Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet
oldavista.com134 points by abnercoimbre a day ago
134 points by abnercoimbre a day ago
Perhaps I am imagining it, but I immediately thought it was a pun on AltaVista in that "alt" in German means old. But there is nothing on the site that seems to suggest that that was how the name came about. (Though in that sense, you can argue the original AltaVista already meant "Old'aVista".) The only clue is this line from the FAQ:
> The name of the website itself is a wordplay on Altavista.
Though, the creator mentions on his own page, that he is a German citizen (due to his grandfather), even though he speaks no German and have never lived there[1]; which could mean that pun is intentional. Not that it is really all that important (like not at all), but I can't help but wonder now...
Well, if it looks like AltaVista, loads like AltaVista and is just as quack-less as AltaVista it probably is a pun on AltaVista.
What evidence would it take to convince you that the name of the website itself is a wordplay on Altavista?
...given the line you quoted from the FAQ, I'm a bit confused about why you are still wondering. That seems about as straight forward of an answer to your question as one could expect.
It is clearly a word play, but I guess their question is whether or not the old = alt connection was made or not.
(Of course the alta in Altavista is from Spanish "high", but that doesn't really change anything)
The rhyming is good, making "Oldavista" a generic wordplay that is merely more obvious to find for German speakers, and the name is insignificant compared to the effort of reproducing the whole Altavista page.
>I'm a bit confused about why you are still wondering
They did admit to being German.
And here I thought it was going to be something to do with, at least in my experience, the much more memorable site: Astalavista. I will say, the linked site is nice for nostalgia and arguably more pleasant than being advertised donkey shows.
Sites like this remind me the internet used to be fun, and it was glorious. Really, makes me want to bust out Frontpage 2000 and Macromedia Fireworks to build a sweet landing page for an anime fan site and setup some phpBB forums.
I've been around the 'net long enough to remember when Altavista didn't even have it's own domain name, it was altavista.digital.com, this triggered some great memories of my first year or two using the web on the only computer in school with access to it.
It seemed to take them a really long time to get rid of the digital part, probably because marketing thought it was good thing. At least it didn't require you to prepend www.
The transparent pixel is often missing and breaks tables. HTML tags must be written properly in CAPS `<FONT>`, not `<font>`.
It doesn't work properly in my Netscape Navigator.
AV was something your uncle used - the OGs searched on Northern Light.
That's very cool. But I really need to know how many people have visited the site as well as how long a page will take to download on a 56k modem.
Related. Others?
Old'aVista, a Guide to the Old Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39069910 - Jan 2024 (12 comments)
Cameron's World - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10085542 - Aug 2015 (63 comments)
The nostalgia welled up within me from depths I didn’t know I possessed.
The politics forum discussing the future of America dated 1998 is insanely depressing. That is optimism that disappeared forever.
But is it running on those incredible 64-bit Alpha servers?
Seems they've done a good job of mimicking the old timey dial up connection speed as well.
Sadly, DEC Alphaservers are not easy to come by. They had to make it work on Intel ones.
I was hoping it was an index of pages with last-modified http headers prior to a certain date.
Did anyone ever use directories? I remember the search engine. Yahoo had the same.
It always felt a long winded way to find stuff or was that the "sponsored content" we get now?
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