Tripod
The free personal-homepage host where a generation first learned HTML. A sibling to GeoCities and Angelfire, it started as a resource for college kids and accidentally became a building full of gloriously amateur websites about absolutely everything.
Tripod was founded in Williamstown, Massachusetts by Bo Peabody, Brett Hershey, and Williams College economics professor Dick Sabot. It began in the early 1990s aimed at college students — a magazine called Tools for Life, a discount card — before the web swallowed everything. The domain tripod.com was registered on September 29, 1994, and the site officially launched in 1995. Free homepage creation, at first almost an afterthought, became the whole business.
Alongside GeoCities and Angelfire, Tripod formed the free-hosting triumvirate where anyone could hand-build a site about literally anything — a favorite band, a pet, a fan shrine — and where a lot of people wrote their first line of HTML. Tripod skewed toward college students. By early 2001 it had grown to six million registered users.
Lycos announced its acquisition of Tripod on February 3, 1998 for about $58 million in stock, and later picked up Angelfire too (through its purchase of WhoWhere). Tripod outlasted most of its peers by decades, but in March 2026 Lycos posted a 30-day shutdown notice for both Tripod and Angelfire, and Tripod ceased operations on April 24, 2026 — closing the book on one of the places where the personal web was born.
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