Back in the stone ages, Tripod offered Perl hosting with its free accounts, and that, along with javascript, was my introduction to programming.

I wrote what may have been the worst ever attempt at a messageboard, and I think only one other person ever even used it. Every post was a single line in a URL-encoded textfile. Good times.

I built a service specifically to be a CORS sql database and user management api backend for neocities last year. The example app was forum single page app. I pimped it here but it didn't get any traction. It was my "wouldn't it be cool if" from building geocities sites back in the day. I guess there are a lot of other avenues for learning to code nowadays.

I just checked my old Tripod site -- it's still there, but the CGI appears to have broken:

    The proxy server could not handle the request GET /cgi-bin/hello.cgi.

    Reason: Could not connect to remote machine: Connection refused

Oh geez I forgot all about tripod doing that. That's one of the places I originally cut my teeth with perl. That and Matt's script archive (though I was quickly fixing or rewriting those as I learned)

Same! Homestead and Geocities were just enough to introduce me to Frontpage and Dreamweaver, and a year or two later I ended up becoming a web standards nerd. Fast forward fifteen years and I'm managing other engineers now.

I taught myself HTML from a children's book(!) and Geocities hosted my first amateur website; I miss it still. I liked that there was an option for hand-coding your HTML rather than use a website builder, an option most free hosts don't now have. I am very grateful for Neocities!

Same here... except it was (Free)webs. Back then, they let you code your own pages as long as you put a little banner that had their logo on it somewhere on each page. Don't know if they do anything like that anymore.

Same here. My first web page was on "expage" but I quickly ended up on Geocities and Angelfire for quite awhile. When I finally moved on to 'real' hosts I used Hypermart and Virtualave to host my Perl.