EMWare Productions
June 8, 2004
For reasons unknown, the infamous Geocities removed one of my old (and quite stale) sites housed on their servers. Well, it had only been stored on there statically since 1997. Does that give them just cause to remove it? Yeah, alright, in this rare occasion it’s justified.
However, much to my dismay this meant that I no longer had this historical aspect of my web development past, until of course I remembered that the Wayback Machine (courtesy of Archive.org) had the capability to ressurect old pages. The real purpose of the Wayback Machine is to view the historical changes (aesthetically and contextually) for sites like Microsoft and Amazon.
I used it of course to find the original Geocities address that EMWare Productions, my old freeware software development company, was stored at. Sure enough the results were satisfying and I eventually preserved the old site here on the kartooner.com servers.
Curiously enough, a few years back (2000 to be precise) I was contacted via Federal Express by a company called EMWare based in Orem, Utah. They instructed me to “Cease and Desist” the name ‘EMWare’ due to copyright infringements and trademark provisions. To make a long story short, I had a fun time explaining to them the supposed company of which I ran was created by a 17-year-old and a 13-year old.
Life is funny so I keep laughing at it, not with it.
You can view the original un-touched design (circa 1997) of the EMWare Productions site (all of its text-only glory) here:
4 comments
Yow. I remember those days. I wish I could dig up some of my old geocities sites from my high school days, they were awful. But hey, what more could you expect at the time? Everyone was using frames and Java buttons on their site, I couldn’t be left out, right?
by Paul G on June 8, 2004 at 2:40 pm. #
Earlier today, at the office, I needed a quick tutorial on SQL inner joins. So, I went Googling for it. One of the sites that I found was a geocities site. When I clicked to visit, it was gone.
I think you’re right. After awhile of inactivity, Geocities is likely dumping sites.
On a side note, I completely forgot about the Wayback machine! That would’ve come in handy today.
Tim
by Tim Macalpine on June 9, 2004 at 1:15 am. #
If I could find my original Geocities portfolio site (The Wayback Machine isn’t finding it) I don’t think I would want to see it anyway.
It’s kinda nice though to see how far you’ve come right?
by Todd on June 9, 2004 at 9:43 am. #
The Wayback machine works wonders and has certainly saved a lot of my previous work, of which I thought couldn’t be salvaged.
Todd, you’re right. It is an eye-opener in regards to how far I’ve come and how my skills have evolved and progressed, for the better I hope. I remember “coding” this particular page in Netcape’s WYSIWYG editor because I wasn’t entirely knowledgable in HTML.
The only aspect of the EMWare site that wasn’t salvaged was the background, which is the only downside to Archive’s otherwise excellent service. Any images used in your pages need to still reside in their default directories because the Wayback machine doesn’t store copies of these images.
What matters is that the text was saved and I’m happy about that, even if the site just plain sucks (multi-colored text, sloppy code and horrendous use of HTML).
by kartooner on June 9, 2004 at 12:05 pm. #