After fifteen years, GeoCities is shutting down for good today. The Internet Archive has been working with Yahoo to make sure that the Wayback Machine has a complete, final snapshot of GeoCities before it goes offline.

The Archive Team, another archivist group run by Jason Scott of textfiles.com, is also archiving GeoCities. Jason created an under construction animated gif gallery to show the important cultural artifacts that we are going to lose with the GeoCities closure. I was browsing the gallery and found this little guy:

That penguin looks a lot like Tux, the linux penguin, but he’s actually the old-school mascot of QuickTime. I think his name was KickTam, which was how someone’s kid pronounced QuickTime. I forget the details.

KickTam isn’t used by Apple marketing, but you can sometimes find him hanging out with the QuickTime developers. He’s seen less and less everyday, and I was surprised to stumble upon him wearing a hard hat.

I think the only place that Apple still has KickTam up on apple.com is on the Letters from the Ice Floe page. Icefloe were tech notes that were useful to developers. I remember pointing people to Icefloe #19 every once in a while, and was surprised to see it is ten years old now. It seems the last Icefloe was written in 2001, and I imagine these will slip off apple.com soon, and KickTam will be gone from the net forever.

Filed under: all talk, archive, geocities, kicktam, no code, quicktime · 2 Comments