GirlGeeks

» see girlgeeks.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

GirlGeeks began in 1998 as a documentary film. Kristine Hanna and Peter Crosby set out to record what women had done in computing and what they were still doing, shooting on-camera interviews and putting up an informational site alongside the production. The original name was GirlGeeks with a question mark on the end, because the thing they were actually investigating was the word itself: some of the women they interviewed read "geek" as an insult and some wore it as a badge.

The question mark came off and the site turned into the business. By 2000 girlgeeks.com described itself in its own meta tag as "the first Career, Training & Empowerment Community on the World Wide Web for aspiring young women in computing," and the title bar read GirlGeeks: The Source for Women in Technology. There was a boutique. There was a forum running on a Perl script called discus.cgi. There was a video section called Geek Peeks that promised new clips daily, which in 2000, over a modem, was an act of considerable optimism.

It worked for a while. Funded by angel and Silicon Valley money in 1999, GirlGeeks.com was serving as many as 50,000 unique visitors a month on a staff of 22, running a job board and resume database that Intel and Microsoft paid into, plus live webcasts for Take Our Daughters To Work Day. The plan was to be acquired: the site positioned itself as a career-success property with a clear path into the e-recruiting consolidation everybody expected. Then the market for e-recruiting properties stopped existing, along with the market for everything else.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

After the crash, GirlGeeks.com became GirlGeeks.org, a nonprofit program run by the Bay Area Video Coalition. The archive records the handover with unusual precision. The .com serves its last real page in June 2001, throws 403s through the spring of 2002, drops to a 963-byte stub in July, and from 22 September 2002 does nothing but redirect to the .org forever. The .org picks up the traffic and starts rebuilding, growing from 4.4 KB that autumn to about 5.1 KB by the following summer.

Then it stops. From roughly August 2003 onward every single capture of girlgeeks.org comes back between 5,141 and 5,165 bytes. Same page, same welcome message, same email signup box, same invitation to join the forum.

~ what got buried with it ~

The frozen page is dated by its own contents, which is the useful thing about abandoned news modules. The headline rail on girlgeeks.org still carries a story about Yahoo finding new uses for Usenet and a ZDNet item about a company apologizing for an SMS spam blunder. Below those sits a tech feature on sharing a small custom-built database across a network without forcing everyone onto the same platform. Those were live concerns in 2003. They were served to visitors unchanged until 2019.

The ghostsites blog flagged GirlGeeks as dead in August 2006. By then it had already been standing still for three years and would stand still for thirteen more. Nobody at a nonprofit host ever gets handed the job of switching off a page that costs nothing to leave up, and GirlGeeks had dropped out of everyone's job description well before 2006.

~ sixteen years of the same page ~

The last capture of girlgeeks.org is from 18 October 2019. After that there is nothing, and today the domain returns SERVFAIL, which means the delegation itself is gone rather than the server being down. Somebody at some point stopped paying, and the page that had been answering identically since the second Bush administration finally went quiet.

I did not know this site existed while it was alive, and by the time I was old enough to hold an opinion about women-in-technology career sites, this one had been a still image for a decade. What I find striking in retrospect is the pitch: in 1999 the premise that women in computing needed a dedicated career community, with daily video and mentoring attached, was treated as a venture-scale opportunity worth building a company around. It stayed up as a monument to that premise for sixteen years, with the same headlines, long after the company behind it had been folded into a video nonprofit and forgotten.

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