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...
Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet
41–50 of 50 posts
Re: Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
Re: Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet
#44Perhaps 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…
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.)
Re: Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet
#45Did 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?
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>
Re: Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet
#46I was hoping that searching Scout Report would take me to https://scout.wisc.edu/report/current (current = 2021, RIP)
Re: Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet
#47That'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?
Re: Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet
#48Re: Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet
#49But is it running on those incredible 64-bit Alpha servers?
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
Re: Old'aVista – The most powerful guide to the old Internet
#50Perhaps 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…
Do it! The internet needs more of this!