FreeDiskSpace.com

» see freediskspace.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

FreeDiskSpace.com opened in 1999 and the name was the pitch. You made an account, you got space on somebody else's hard drive, and you paid nothing for it. The title tag called it a "free download and file storage center", which is vague enough to cover anything, but the keywords meta underneath was not vague at all. It reads: free mp3s, freestuff, download files, mp3 files, hard drive, diskspace, freeware, store files, warez, storage, data backup, virtual floppy, palm, imacfloppy, freedrive, memory, megs, megabytes, shared folders. Somebody sat down and typed the word warez into their own search metadata, which tells you exactly which traffic they were bidding for.

In March 2000 it raised the ceiling to 300 megabytes specifically for MP3 users and added a feature called WebClipper that pulled a song into your account in one click. Think about what 300 MB meant that year. A hard drive in a home PC might be four or six gigabytes total, a CD burner was still a luxury item, and a single MP3 at the bitrates people actually used ran three or four megs. The service was offering room for most of a music collection, at a moment when getting that collection onto anything portable was genuinely hard.

The account lived behind an ASP application at /Index.asp, and from late 1999 the front page was a plain redirect into it, which is why the archive holds so many tiny 302s from that stretch. That is the shape of a service that was working: nothing to see at the door, everything happening once you were logged in.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the name that went somewhere else ~

The brand did not get a shutdown notice. It got overwritten. By 10 May 2001 the page at freediskspace.com is titled "Myspace. Data storage, collaboration and management", and the giveaway that this is the same site wearing a new name is the keywords meta underneath, still listing free mp3s and warez, untouched from 1999. Nobody rewrote the metadata. They changed the title and shipped it.

A month later the page had shrunk to a holding screen with an email box on it, asking you to leave an address "to be notified about future developments at my space". The footer settles the ownership question: "Myspace.com is a service owned by YourZ.com, Inc. Copyright c 1999-2000 YourZ.com, Inc." Then on 21 July 2001 the whole thing collapsed to 379 bytes, which is a head, a title reading "Freediskspace", and one meta refresh pointing at http://www.myspace.com with a delay of three tenths of a second.

That redirect was aimed at myspace.com in the summer of 2001, and the MySpace everybody remembers did not exist yet. The domain belonged to YourZ.com and was being used for exactly what FreeDiskSpace had been used for, online storage, and it failed at that too. The social network launched on the same address in August 2003 under eUniverse, after the storage business had already been given up on. So the last thing FreeDiskSpace.com ever did was point a browser at the future biggest site on the internet, two years early, for completely unrelated reasons.

~ where i was ~

This one I was in range of. In 1999 I was a teenager in Turkey on a 33.6k modem climbing toward 56k, and the entire problem of that era was that files were bigger than the pipe and bigger than the disk. Free storage sites were part of the furniture: you used them to move something you could not email, or to park a file where a friend could pull it down instead of you holding a connection open. I cannot tell you I had a FreeDiskSpace account, because I do not remember which of the dozen interchangeable ones I used. What I remember is the arithmetic. Three hundred megabytes over a 56k line is roughly a full day of downloading with the phone unusable, so the generous number on the signup page and the number you could realistically move were two different quantities, and everybody on dial-up knew it.

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