# Ancient Web: Phone-Man Answered GeoCities-Era Wiring Questions Keith A. Michal's home telephone wiring guide grew from a 1997 GeoCities advice page into a detailed independent reference on telephone jacks, color codes, DSL and repairs. 2026-10-10 :: Switchboard Tech Services ![Ancient Web: Phone-Man Answered GeoCities-Era Wiring Questions](https://switchboardtechservices.com/static/images/defaults/articles.webp) Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/). In 1997, having a second telephone line was a household improvement worth explaining with diagrams. Keith A. Michal made an entire website for the job. [Visit Phone-Man's Home Phone Wiring Advice Page](https://homephonewiring.com/) Michal's homepage provides guides for adding telephone jacks, wiring second and third lines, understanding cable colors, installing DSL splitters, and dealing with the telephone network interface at a house. Its navigation still separates practical topics into tiny dedicated HTML pages instead of asking visitors to watch one giant instructional video. The [site's own history](https://www.homephonewiring.com/why-HPW.html) says Michal began the project while working for **Bell Atlantic**, predecessor of part of Verizon. People asked him basic telephone-wiring questions while he was on other jobs. A website address on a card made it possible to give them an answer without repeating the same explanation all day. For a few years the advice lived at GeoCities addresses, including **SiliconValley/Pines/4116** and **phone-man.geo**. The old hosting names survive right on the homepage. ## When bandwidth made a free homepage expensive Michal reports that the advice page ran as a free, noncommercial site from **1997 to 2003**. In 2002, traffic began exceeding the limits of GeoCities' free hosting, so he registered [HomePhoneWiring.com](http://HomePhoneWiring.com) and moved to paid hosting. The visitor counts are an unusually concrete record. The homepage says its old counter logged more than **454,000 visits** from May 1997 to June 2002, then more than **1,137,000 visits** from June 2002 to January 2006. These are site-reported figures, counted by services with different methods, not verified unique-reader statistics. The site also includes caution notices and pages asking why its design still looks old. The answer is visible everywhere: links to one topic at a time, plain illustrations, colored labels, and a long-lived preference for making material easy to find. Some linked inner pages were not retrievable by the research reader during this review; their presence in the navigation is verified, not a guarantee that every instruction remains available or technically current. Electrical and communications wiring standards can change, and historical advice is not a substitute for checking current codes. The larger historical point is clear. When ordinary homes had multiple landlines and dial-up modems, someone with real field experience could turn repetitive questions into a reference book anybody could bookmark. [Explore the original Phone-Man homepage](https://homephonewiring.com/) and [its account of moving beyond GeoCities](https://www.homephonewiring.com/why-HPW.html). Part of the [Ancient Web Collection](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-collection/). - Categories: [Ancient Web](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/categories/ancient-web/) - Tags: [#ancientweb](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/ancientweb/), [#webhistory](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/webhistory/), [#geocities](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/geocities/), [#telephony](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/telephony/), [#technicalguides](https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/tags/technicalguides/) [Articles RSS](https://switchboardtechservices.com/feeds/articles.xml "Subscribe using an RSS reader") --- Canonical URL: https://switchboardtechservices.com/articles/ancient-web-phone-man-answered-geocities-era-wiring-questions/ Language: en-us Content type: article Author: Switchboard Tech Services Published: 2026-10-10T08:35:39+00:00 Modified: 2026-10-18T21:04:14.369412+00:00