The impending demise of geocities.com reminded me of an event from 2004. In that year a former colleague named Larry Stockmeyer died from pancreatic cancer. I remember thinking at the time that those of us who knew him would always have our memories to appreciate his humanity and his intelligence. Other computer scientists need to rely upon the scholarly literature to preserve his scientific legacy. In spite of its many failings, the scholarly process still functions pretty well at this.
As science has evolved, we have adopted an informal tradition of putting our research papers on the web, often using free services to do so (e.g., our employer). It’s good to see that Larry’s old page on www.almaden.ibm.com is still around, but Larry also put many of his papers up on a geocities site as well. I remember at the time he died that his geocities page probably wouldn’t last forever, so I quietly made a copy of it on my own site, just to preserve his legacy a bit longer. Now that geocities is finally going away, it reminds me that science (particularly theoretical work) is destined to outlive almost all technology, and it is only through a community of scientists that we will properly curate our work. As my small part of it, I’ve exposed Larry’s original home page on the cstheory.com site.
Followup: the query [site:geocities.com "theoretical computer science"] on google reveals that there are quite a few pages on geocities that are concerned with theoretical computer science. I doubt that many of them are very important, but only history gets to decide what is important in science.