box24.boom.ru ("B o x # 24") — the site of a Nizhny Novgorod trading stall that sold and bought computer components at the Kulibin Park in Nizhny Novgorod[1]. It operated from 2000 to 2003[3]. The project described itself thus: "The world's first Internet-larёk TM" — with a separate note on the home page, "not to be confused with an Internet store"[1]. In a period catalog listing the wording was more modest: "The first Nizhny Novgorod Internet stall. Computer parts and much more. Buying and selling used goods"[3].

A stall at the Radio Market

The address in the site's header was given not as a street but as a spot at the market: Nizhny Novgorod, Kulibin Park, Radio Market, stall 24[1]. The same page listed opening hours — 10:00 to 14:00, closed Mondays — and the phone number 65-72-97[1]. By 2003 the stall was open an hour longer, until 15:00[2].

The home page explained the site's purpose directly: to browse the range and place an order without a trip to the Radio Market, and along the way to sell off whatever was "gathering dust in a drawer" — the examples given were a 386-DX-40, a 210 Mb hard drive, and a Pentium III at 850 MHz[1]. The "Deal of the week" section in the October 2000 snapshot offered two ready-made builds: one on an Intel Celeron 266 MHz MMX with an Asus KN97-X 5IEM2-Z1 motherboard, 16 Mb SIMM, a 1 Gb drive and an SVGA 512 Kb video card, the other on an Intel Pentium 3 500 MHz with a Chaintech CT-6ATA4 board, 64 Mb DIMM, a 17.2 Gb drive and an ASUS V2740TV with 8 Mb; both came in ATX cases with a "Win 98, Office 97, Games" bundle[1].

Sections of the site

The menu included "Prices," "Sales," "Purchases," "Service," "Discounts on purchases," "Computer broken?," "Returns," "Tech support," "DoCToR'S LabPage," "Banner exchange," and "Driver search"[1]. Driver and file search via FTP appeared on 10 October 2000 and ran on the third-party service filesearch.ru[1]. On 14 August 2000 exchange rates were added to the site, and on 16 August "purchase discounts" were announced: the first purchase at retail price, the second at wholesale[1]. The "DoCToR'S LabPage" page opened on 1 August 2000, and by 3 August the news feed was already thanking Timofey Konshin for the first "bugs" reported[1].

A noticeable share of the news feed had nothing to do with trading: the site's owner was a McLaren-Mercedes fan and kept a chronicle of the 2000 Formula 1 championship on the home page — from Häkkinen's win at the Belgian Grand Prix on 27 August to the points table (Häkkinen 66, Schumacher 64, Coulthard 58) and an 8 October entry on the "collapse of McLaren-Mercedes fans' hopes"[1]. For turn-of-the-millennium home pages, this mix of a price list and a personal hobby was commonplace.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site made it into the overall top of the regional counter Counter.nn.ru for 2000 with a rating score of 17[3] — by the standards of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of that time, this was a modest but genuine presence: the page of a single market stall stood on the same list as sites of enterprises and editorial offices. In the voting for the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, box24.boom.ru received no votes[4]: by then the site had already gone a year without updates[2]. For more on the sample this address was part of, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

The market's move and the site's end

The last surviving snapshot of the home page is dated 23 April 2003, and in place of the price list it carries a notice of relocation[2]. The Radio Market, the home page reported, had moved "to the former vacant lot between the edge of the Meshcherskoye Ozero residential neighborhood and the Old Fair Cathedral behind the Main Fair Hall"[2]. Along with the market, the stall number also changed — from 24 to 86 — and the site's name changed with it: visitors were now directed to www.box86.boom.ru, with mail to be sent to box86@mail.nnov.ru[2].

Thus box24.boom.ru did not close but was abandoned along with the old trading spot: the stall number had been written into the domain name, and the market's move automatically made the address invalid. In total, the Wayback Machine's index lists 13 snapshots of this address[3]. A check made while preparing this article showed that the domain box24.boom.ru no longer exists[3].

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2000 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  3. proto.nnov.ec — Archival research on the Nizhny Novgorod internet based on the counter.nn.ru rating data (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet 2004 voting results (archive)