Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet

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...

[1] https://www.ericexperiment.com/about-me

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.

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.

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.

I was an internal beta tester for AltaVista while I was doing a co-op at DEC in 1995. Good times.

Related. Others?

Old'aVista, a Guide to the Old Internet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39069910 - Jan 2024 (12 comments)

AV was something your uncle used - the OGs searched on Northern Light.

The nostalgia welled up within me from depths I didn’t know I possessed.

But is it running on those incredible 64-bit Alpha servers?

The politics forum discussing the future of America dated 1998 is insanely depressing. That is optimism that disappeared forever.

Seems they've done a good job of mimicking the old timey dial up connection speed as well.

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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