spk.r52.ru was the website of the Nizhny Novgorod printing house "SPK," which existed in 2001 on the third level of the R52.ru portal. The page's owner was listed as OOO "Kommerchesko-Proizvodstvennoe Predpriyatie 'SPK'" (Commercial-Production Enterprise "SPK"); the copyright mark on the home page was dated 2000[1]. The Nizhny Novgorod connection is evident directly from the home page text: among the printing house's clients were listed the city and regional administration, district administrations, GAZ, the Bor Glass Factory, and OAO "Etna"[1].

What the site looked like

Judging by the surviving snapshots, the substantive part of the site fit on a single page: the heading "Kommerchesko-Proizvodstvennoe Predpriyatie 'SPK'," the subheading "SPK Printing House," and three paragraphs of text about production[1]. Between May and October 2001 the text did not change by a single word — the snapshots from May 19 and October 1 match verbatim[2].

The company wrote briefly about itself. As the home page stated, "SPK Printing House is quality multicolor printing," and "it all began with small machines for making business cards"; further on, in its own words, "new equipment kept appearing and experience accumulated in producing the most complex output"[1].

The list of services came down to a single phrase: "a full range of printing services on our own production base — design, prepress preparation, printing, developing work"[1]. It was exactly this phrase, cut off mid-sentence, that ended up in the nn.ru directory listing, from which the site made its way into our census.

Neither a postal address, nor a phone number, nor a price list, nor an order form appears in the preserved text of the home page — the archive at this address did not carry contact details[1][2]. The only credit line at the bottom of the page — "Web design by Teamoty Brane Inc." — shows the site was made not by the printers themselves but by an outside contractor[1].

Clients

The most substantive part of the page is the client list, and it is also the best evidence of what the printing house lived on. "Our clients have appreciated the quality and prices of our products," the home page said; among them were named the city and regional administration, district administrations, GAZ, the Bor Glass Factory, OAO "Etna," the Nizhny Novgorod representative of Waxoyl, and "firms engaged in selling automobiles"[1]. A recognizable set: regional and city authorities, major factories of the region, and the automobile trade — that is, a customer for forms, brochures, and advertising materials of the early 2000s.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

spk.r52.ru was one of many corporate addresses that the Nizhny Novgorod portal R52 handed out to businesses on its own domain: the printing house never registered a name of its own in the ru zone, and its entire Nizhny Novgorod Internet presence came down to a page inside someone else's holdings. No trace of attention to the site has survived: this address does not appear in our samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter, nor are any votes for it recorded in the data of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day. More on how this sample was compiled and why not everything made it in — in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

How it closed

The site lived less than a year. The earliest snapshot with text is dated May 19, 2001[1]; on October 1 the page is still in place and unchanged[2]; but already by December 4, 2001, spk.r52.ru was serving the portal's standard placeholder page: "R52 — work in progress. We apologize, our site is currently under construction. Please come back later!" — with a single link, "Return to the R52 portal"[3]. The story breaks off with this snapshot: it is also the last snapshot of the site in the web archive.

Whether the printing house returned to this address after the "work," the archive does not show — there are no more substantive pages at it. According to our census, the domain spk.r52.ru no longer exists today, and no successor to it has been recorded.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — R52 portal placeholder, 2001 (archive)