Live data from Hacker News

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

oldavista.com

21–30 of 50 posts

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

#21
post #4

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 m…

...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)

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

#24
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...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.

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

#26

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.

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

#30
post #4

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 m…

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 pa…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN