- 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...
- 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!
- 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.
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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.
- Chrome Dev tools can help you there
- 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
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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143 points by abnercoimbre 1 day ago | 36 comments