We all like having our birthdays associated with a famous or successful name. Even those of us who think astrology is the bunk suspect that maybe, just maybe, proximity on the calendar means that we’ll inherit some of those admirable qualities.

I’ve never felt particularly fortunate in the people who share my birthday, which came recently. I’ve got friends and relations whose natal days coincide with Abraham Lincoln, Golda Meir and Sandy Koufax. I’m co-birthed with Johnny Carson, Weird Al Yankovic and Gummo Marx—you know, the painfully unfunny brother. Not the kind of greatness you might hope for. (At that, I definitely fared better than one of my sisters, who shares a birthday with a Mr. A. Hitler.)

So I was very pleased to see that if I don’t have a famous person sharing my little square of the calendar, I’m at least darn close to some really major tech milestones that were celebrated recently and that have come to play an important role in my—and everyone else’s–life.

For one, say happy birthday to the Internet itself. It has kind of a rolling birthday since so many people and groups contributed, but if you mark its inception from the time one person sent a message to another in cyberspace, it happened on Oct. 29, 1969, when a computer science professor at UCLA sent a message to the computer of another professor at Stanford Research Institute in Palo Alto CA.

The UCLA sender, computer science professor Leonard Kleinrock, was trying to send the message ‘login” to start a remote program on the Stanford computer. Actually, he got as far as “lo” before the system crashed. So the Internet and suddenly lowered expectations were delivered on the same day.

The second birthday is even more closely related to what I now do to earn my daily bread. The Web banner ad celebrated a 15th birthday on Oct. 27. That first banner appeared atop the pages of Hotwired.com, the online version of the dot-com bible Wired magazine back in 1994. The first clients, according to an account by then-account executive Frank Angelo , were names that practically call up those heady days all by themselves: a handful of long distance services (MCI, AT&T and 1-800-Collect), Volvo, Club Med, and Zima, the house wine of the ‘90s.

Some of these ads, according to Angelo’s account, led to landing pages that wouldn’t even qualify as such today. The Volvo ad, for example, drove visitors to a questionnaire about what kind of Volvo they might be in the market for—one that they could then click to e-mail to the company.

For all their relative lack of sophistication, those early banners had one major thing going for them: novelty. The newness of being instructed to “click here” was enough to earn those early display ads a click-through rate as high as 78%. Nowadays, online advertisers are pretty happy with a CTR that places that decimal two positions to the left.

So happy birthday banner ads, and thank you for not blinking and strobing as much as you did in your adolescence. And for ending the mass slaughter of ducks and bopping of monkeys.

The cycle of life dictates that for birth, there should be the other thing. So it’s also worth noting the demise of something important too. GeoCities was the online platform that gave most people their first experience with a personal Web page.

Born in 1994 as “Beverly Hills Internet” and re-christened in 1995, it let its first users—called “homesteaders” because they were so much further out than other Net visitors—build hosted pages to tout their hobbies, passions, interest groups and quirks, and then organize them into “neighborhoods” so that people with similar interest could find them. If you were interested in shopping, your page “lived” in Beverly Hills. Political pages were located in the Capitol district; sci-fi buffs hung around Area 51; and movie and entertainment mavens pointed their browsers toward GeoCities’ Hollywood.

In other words, they were the first open-access social interest community on the Web, a sod-roof cabin version of what grew up, in time, to become Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, LinkedIn, Hi5, and their ilk.

The site was a huge success by early dot-com standards. It went public in august 1998, and shares closed that first day at 120% above its offering price on the Nasdaq. The site went on to become one of the top five destinations on the Web.

Yahoo bought the company in 1999, but was never able to build on the interest of those early Web pioneers. And after a long period of languishing among the Yahoo portfolio, the Web portal finally turned out the lights on GeoCities last Monday—despite the fact that GeoCities.com was still among the top 200 Web sites in the U.S. according to metrics service Alexa.

Those with a historical bent—or just a nostalgia for lovably cheesy home-coded graphics—can still get a look at the glory that was GeoCities, thanks to an archive project called ReoCities which is reconstructing all the neighborhoods of the original but is still working on verifying and reconstructing the individual page “houses”.

Why bother? Because “Yahoo has done an amazing thing by keeping GeoCities alive for as long as they did, but we feel that it is a waste to leave the Internet with a hole of this magnitude,” the archivists say on their site.