GeoCities
Free web hosting that gave millions of people their first homepage, organised into themed "neighborhoods" with street addresses instead of domain names.
The company started in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet and took the GeoCities name a year later. Your page lived at an address like geocities.com/SiliconValley/Heights/4827 — SiliconValley for tech, Area51 for science fiction, Heartland for family life. The aesthetic became an era in itself: animated GIF dividers, "under construction" signs, hit counters, background MIDI and tiled wallpaper. Yahoo bought it in 1999 for $3.57 billion and shut down the US service in October 2009; the Japanese version survived until 2019. Archive Team pulled down roughly a terabyte before the lights went out, which is the only reason any of it still exists.