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...
Unfortunately, I cannot edit my original post anymore, but it seems a few replies misunderstood my comment; in short: I wasn't questioning whether it is a wordplay (it clearly is), I was questioning which wordplay. Is it Old'aVista just because it kind of sounds like AltaVista, or is it Old'aVista because "alt" in German means old?
I'm glad you made the comment because at the very least I learned a new German word (native English speaker and conversational in Spanish).
It's ironic to search for "alt meaning" and find a tertiary definition of "Pitched in the first octave above the treble staff; high" which would suggest more of the Spanish "alta" root rather than the Germanic root.
Now I'm curious how much origins are shared between Spanish and German.
Perhaps we can all agree English is a goofy language!
The modern Germanic "alt" has some interesting leftovers in English from before English migrated its pronunciation/spelling towards "old". The word "auld" for instance (as in the holiday classic "Auld Lang Syne"). The beer term "ale" comes from "altbier" ("old beer") as in the "oldest known style of beer". (Lager yeasts were a later find. Also, if you are curious "lager" comes from "lagern" which mostly means "to cool/chill", with that being the benefit of lager yeasts that they are live and productive at colder temperatures.)
Both of which also suggest to me other ways to try to have made the wordplay in Old'aVista even cleaner if it was an intentional multilingual wordplay. "Ale-a-Vista" might have been silly or "AuldaVista" might have been funnier.
...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.
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.
Alt=old in German, but Alta=high in Spanish. And vista is pretty much a Spanish word. A high observation point is a pretty good metaphor for a search engine.
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.
Astalavista was named in jest after the original AltaVista, it just survived a bit longer after AltaVista lost the search wars to the newcomers like Infoseek and Ask Jeeves who in turn eventually lost to newcomers like Google. How much you remember AltaVista probably says a lot about when the first time you used the internet was and maybe if you were a Yahoo or AltaVista fan at the time. (In those days Yahoo had the better human curated hierarchical directory and AltaVista had the better search index with more boolean and exact search operators supported.)
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.
Remember when you'd be looking at a daily news article, and any hyperlinks to audio clips would have byte sizes and download time estimations in parentheses, just to help you decide if it was worth a click?
AltaVista: AlphaStation 500, 256 MB memory, 6GB disk.
AlphaStation 500's handle all external traffic to the site.
They run a custom multi-threaded Web server which sends
queries to the Web indexer and News indexer.
Web Indexer: AlphaServer 8400 5/300, 10 processors, 6 GB
memory, 210 GB RAID disk. This model is the most powerful
computer built by Digital. These servers run the query
engine. The Web index is larger than 40 GB, but most
requests take less than a second.
Scooter: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 1.5 GB memory, 30 GB RAID
disk. The super-spider runs from this machine. It fetches
pages from the Web and sends them to Vista, our primary web
indexer.
Vista: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 2 processors, 2GB memory,
180GB RAID disk. This machine indexes Scooter output and
serves as a central distribution point for new index data.
News Indexer: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 13 GB
disk. This machine keeps an up-to-date index of the news
spool: since new articles appear and old articles expire all
the time, it is in fact quite busy, even though the index it
serves is much smaller than the Web index.
News Server: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 24 GB RAID
disks. It maintains a current news spool for the News
Indexer. It also serves the articles via http to those of
you who don't want to know about news servers but want to
read news."[0]
Absolutely. Yahoo started out as directories, long before it added a search engine. They were a much better way to discover new corners of the internet (sorta like looking at a list of subreddits today). Web rings was another one. Internet was new, so it was always fun to surprise yourself with something different. Search engines were crap and would normally be used to look for something specific rather than discovery, which I guess hasn't changed.
Yahoo was originally "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle", and earlier "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". A key position at the company was a librarian who help establish and slot links into that hierarchy, and some early press addressed this and the obvious future role of library science in online content management. Don't believe all forward-looking speculation you read. (Or backward-looking reminiscences, for that matter.)
These were both useful and limited. Useful because early Web content-based search sucked. Altavista was the best of the bunch to my recollection, and only launched in late 1995. Google came along in (late?) 1997 and blew everyone away, I was using it by 1999. There were "sponsored content" directories, but those tended not to gain much traction as they were so obviously inferior in quality. The main directories generally avoided this taint.
The Web was far smaller, far less commercial, much less dynamic (editable / user-contributable sites were extremely rare, blogs barely existed), and pretty eclectic. Organising by category pretty much worked, as content evolved slowly, the total space was relatively small, and highlighting the Really Good Stuff was both useful and tractable. Today that's fairly intractable, though directory-like organisation might be seen in, say Wikipedia or some similar projects.
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
What evidence would it take to convince you that the name of the website itself is a wordplay on Altavista?
Unfortunately, I cannot edit my original post anymore, but it seems a few replies misunderstood my comment; in short: I wasn't questioning whether it is a wordplay (it clearly is), I was questioning which wordplay. Is it Old'aVista just because it kind of sounds like AltaVista, or is it Old'aVista because "alt" in German means old?
I'm glad you made the comment because at the very least I learned a new German word (native English speaker and conversational in Spanish).
It's ironic to search for "alt meaning" and find a tertiary definition of "Pitched in the first octave above the treble staff; high" which would suggest more of the Spanish "alta" root rather than the Germanic root.
Now I'm curious how much origins are shared between Spanish and German.
Perhaps we can all agree English is a goofy language!
The modern Germanic "alt" has some interesting leftovers in English from before English migrated its pronunciation/spelling towards "old". The word "auld" for instance (as in the holiday classic "Auld Lang Syne"). The beer term "ale" comes from "altbier" ("old beer") as in the "oldest known style of beer". (Lager yeasts were a later find. Also, if you are curious "lager" comes from "lagern" which mostly means "to cool/chill", with that being the benefit of lager yeasts that they are live and productive at colder temperatures.)
Both of which also suggest to me other ways to try to have made the wordplay in Old'aVista even cleaner if it was an intentional multilingual wordplay. "Ale-a-Vista" might have been silly or "AuldaVista" might have been funnier.
Well, if it looks like AltaVista, loads like AltaVista and is just as quack-less as AltaVista it probably is a pun 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.
Alt=old in German, but Alta=high in Spanish. And vista is pretty much a Spanish word. A high observation point is a pretty good metaphor for a search engine.
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.
Astalavista was named in jest after the original AltaVista, it just survived a bit longer after AltaVista lost the search wars to the newcomers like Infoseek and Ask Jeeves who in turn eventually lost to newcomers like Google. How much you remember AltaVista probably says a lot about when the first time you used the internet was and maybe if you were a Yahoo or AltaVista fan at the time. (In those days Yahoo had the better human curated hierarchical directory and AltaVista had the better search index with more boolean and exact search operators supported.)
.com or .box.sk?
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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.
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.
Remember when you'd be looking at a daily news article, and any hyperlinks to audio clips would have byte sizes and download time estimations in parentheses, just to help you decide if it was worth a click?
Chrome Dev tools can help you there
22 requests 141.94 kB / 122.92 kB transferred Finish: 20.17 s DOMContentLoaded: 1.11 s load: 20.18 s
Astalavista.box.sk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astalavista.box.sk
https://web.archive.org/web/20070202023521/http://www.astala...
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.
But is it running on those incredible 64-bit Alpha servers?
at the rate it's loading (not), probably.
They must be running Windows NT. Wait for the Tru64 port. Or Ultrix, or VMS.
do you have more information about it? thats sounds interesting
"From the archives, a bit of info on AltaVista:
The Hardware Behind AltaVista
AltaVista: AlphaStation 500, 256 MB memory, 6GB disk. AlphaStation 500's handle all external traffic to the site. They run a custom multi-threaded Web server which sends queries to the Web indexer and News indexer.
Web Indexer: AlphaServer 8400 5/300, 10 processors, 6 GB memory, 210 GB RAID disk. This model is the most powerful computer built by Digital. These servers run the query engine. The Web index is larger than 40 GB, but most requests take less than a second.
Scooter: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 1.5 GB memory, 30 GB RAID disk. The super-spider runs from this machine. It fetches pages from the Web and sends them to Vista, our primary web indexer.
Vista: AlphaServer 4100 5/300, 2 processors, 2GB memory, 180GB RAID disk. This machine indexes Scooter output and serves as a central distribution point for new index data.
News Indexer: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 13 GB disk. This machine keeps an up-to-date index of the news spool: since new articles appear and old articles expire all the time, it is in fact quite busy, even though the index it serves is much smaller than the Web index.
News Server: AlphaServer 600 5/333, 896MB memory, 24 GB RAID disks. It maintains a current news spool for the News Indexer. It also serves the articles via http to those of you who don't want to know about news servers but want to read news."[0]
[0] https://groups.google.com/g/comp.unix.tru64/c/aB_z5YXwNMI
The politics forum discussing the future of America dated 1998 is insanely depressing. That is optimism that disappeared forever.
Optimism in general has gone down the drain, and understandably so.
I was hoping that searching Scout Report would take me to https://scout.wisc.edu/report/current (current = 2021, RIP)
I was an internal beta tester for AltaVista while I was doing a co-op at DEC in 1995. Good times.
I was hoping it was an index of pages with last-modified http headers prior to a certain date.
AV was something your uncle used - the OGs searched on Northern Light.
gopher, archie, veronica, jughead.
the original OG's were before the web.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190909191211/https://kb.iu.edu...
1337 h4xx0rz used hastalavista for warez.
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.
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?
Absolutely. Yahoo started out as directories, long before it added a search engine. They were a much better way to discover new corners of the internet (sorta like looking at a list of subreddits today). Web rings was another one. Internet was new, so it was always fun to surprise yourself with something different. Search engines were crap and would normally be used to look for something specific rather than discovery, which I guess hasn't changed.
Yahoo was originally "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle", and earlier "Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web". A key position at the company was a librarian who help establish and slot links into that hierarchy, and some early press addressed this and the obvious future role of library science in online content management. Don't believe all forward-looking speculation you read. (Or backward-looking reminiscences, for that matter.)
DMOZ was another such classification, originally launched by Mozilla and run for a time by AOL, though it closed in 2017, discussed on HN at the time <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13762362> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13759032>.
These were both useful and limited. Useful because early Web content-based search sucked. Altavista was the best of the bunch to my recollection, and only launched in late 1995. Google came along in (late?) 1997 and blew everyone away, I was using it by 1999. There were "sponsored content" directories, but those tended not to gain much traction as they were so obviously inferior in quality. The main directories generally avoided this taint.
The Web was far smaller, far less commercial, much less dynamic (editable / user-contributable sites were extremely rare, blogs barely existed), and pretty eclectic. Organising by category pretty much worked, as content evolved slowly, the total space was relatively small, and highlighting the Really Good Stuff was both useful and tractable. Today that's fairly intractable, though directory-like organisation might be seen in, say Wikipedia or some similar projects.
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DMOZ>
There are still several online directories, some general, many specialised:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_web_directories>
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