vmkfree.narod.ru was an unofficial student site called "Freeware for VMK," which collected study materials and programs for students of the Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics (VMK) at Lobachevsky State University of Nizhny Novgorod[1]. In the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day 2004 competition it was entered under the name "Unofficial site of VMK students, 'Freeware for VMK'"[4]. The site opened on 1 September 2003, moved to the "Narod" hosting service that November, and kept being filled with content until early 2006[1][2].

What was on the site

The home page opened with the line "Welcome to the site of a VMK UNN student, Faculty of Computational Mathematics and Cybernetics" and the explanation that the site was "created to help mainstream-track students of the UNN Faculty of VMK"[1]. The author signed under the studio name "EasyStudio," dated 1 September 2003; the contact address was originally on the nm.ru domain, and by the time of the later snapshots had been replaced with a Gmail address[1][2].

The content was divided into four parts[1][2]:

  • Study section — the main one: lectures and crib sheets for 1st-, 2nd- and 3rd-year subjects, later also for 4th and 5th years[2];
  • Software section — lab assignments and other programs for download;
  • Hyperlinks page — links to other sites;
  • Miscellaneous — a guestbook for feedback, later a "Gallery" section.

The study section was organized by year and subject: notes and crib sheets on the theory of functions of a complex variable, optimization methods, probability theory, mathematical models of natural science, numerical methods, operations research, control theory, as well as economics, sociology, and national history; for equations of mathematical physics there were lab assignments, and for mathematical logic — scanned study guides[1][2]. In August 2005 a separate section appeared, "The VMK Student's Little Library" — around 22 electronic copies of books and study guides for course subjects[2].

The software section consisted of the author's own study programs and lab assignments posted online: Fractals Studio .NET, Global Optimization Utility, Store Data Base Editor, Heat Conductivity Experiments, Splines Builder, "Demonstration of Runge-Kutta Methods," a site for a parallel WaTor program using the MPI library, and a java applet with the game Z-Lines that ran right in the browser[1][2]. In March 2005 a subsection called "User Group Reports" was started, with the first report being "Managed DirectX 9: 3D Graphics Programming on the .NET Framework Platform," later joined by "ADO.NET Lab Assignment" and a description of the "Mechanics Studio .NET" project[2]. That project itself — a program for modeling spatial mechanisms — received its own site on "Narod" on 28 August 2005, mechstd.narod.ru[2].

One of the subsections of "Software" was called "Artists of NN": as the page itself noted, it was "only a design mock-up for a site, not the site itself"[1]. The site rated its own value highly: all materials were "provided for general use for the first time and only here," and "no other web resource will give you the information you will find on this site" — so said the home page[2].

Update history and signs of the times

The site kept an open "Site History" — a list of dated update entries — and it shows the site's whole lifespan. On 1 September 2003 "Freeware for VMK" was first published on the Fatal server, at vmkfree.fatal.ru; on 1 November 2003, "due to technical problems on the Fatal server," the site moved to "Narod," where it stayed[1]. On 15 August 2004 a "thorough overhaul of the site across all sections" took place[1], and on 22 September 2004 "the guestbook was restored to working order"[2].

A separate entry from 22 October 2004 dates the era well: all the documentation for years 2 through 4 was converted to DjVu format, which "reduced the size of each document by a factor of tens," and the materials "became available for quick downloading even over a home modem"[2]. A counter for "the number of distinct site visitors" had been running since 27 June 2005, and the update of 1 September 2005 was titled as visitor statistics "for late August, or whenever students start cramming for retakes" (spelling as in the original)[2].

The last entry in the history is dated 30 January 2006: lectures on "the History of the Development of Mathematics" and notes on "Analysis and Design of Algorithms" for 5th-year students were added, along with lectures on "Network Information Technologies" for 4th-year students and a "VmkFree" screensaver for mobile phones[2]. The page froze at that date. In the 2016 and 2022 snapshots, it still carries two ad blocks: an invitation to the ImagineCup photo contest, "post your photos and get a prize from Microsoft," and a recommendation for the third-party resource biblionic.info for VMK students, with "more than 300 (!) crib sheets, study guides, notes and lectures"[2][3].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site took part in the vote of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day, held on 16 December 2004, in the "Best Personal Site" category as entry number 63. When voting closed, it had received 10 votes by email and none by SMS, placing eighteenth in the category's final table of thirty-seven sites[4]. For scale: the category leader, "Nizhny Novgorod Extreme on the Internet," collected 156 votes by email[4]. In the surviving records of the regional counter Counter.nn.ru, included in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating, the site does not appear: the only measurable trace of its visibility in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet is those ten votes.

Fate of the address

Formally, the site never closed — it simply stopped being updated. The "Narod" free hosting service kept serving the page for many years afterward: a snapshot from 4 March 2016 shows exactly the same home page, still dated 30 January 2006[2], and so does a snapshot from 1 April 2022[3]. The earliest web archive snapshot of the home page is dated 22 September 2004[1], the latest — 1 April 2022[3]. As of a check in August 2026, the site was still responding at this address.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archived)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2016 (archived)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2022 (archived)
  4. web.archive.org — Voting results, Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet, 2004 (archived)