rosal.r52.ru was the site of a Nizhny Novgorod trading company, ROSAL LLC, which sold industrial customers pipes, lifting equipment, automobile spare parts, and building materials. As the home page stated, the firm was located at "Nizhny Novgorod, Vatutina St. 3," and could be reached by phone and fax at "(8312) 44-03-28" and by mail at rosal@r52.ru[1]. The site lived in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone r52.ru, and the bottom of the home page carried the copyright "©2001 \"ROSAL LLC\""[1]. The web archive's last snapshot of the home page was taken on June 13, 2022[2].
What the site looked like
It was a small corporate calling-card site. The text capture of the home page preserved a menu of five sections: "About the Company," "News," "Contacts," "Our Needs," and "Trading Floor"[1]. The last two items set ROSAL apart from other calling-card sites of the time: the firm not only showed its goods but also declared its own demand and a platform for exchange. The content of these sections has not survived in the archival snapshots available to us — the web archive only preserved the home page.
The page opened with a self-introduction. As the home page stated, ROSAL LLC "is a trading company selling products intended for various industries and providing a range of services"[1]. Next came the consumer industries — oil and gas extraction, construction, automotive manufacturing, utilities, and consumer goods[1]. There are no visitor counters in the surviving text of the home page.
What the company offered
The list of goods was laid out on the home page plainly and without detail. It included metal-plastic pipe, autonomous heat and power plants, spare parts for products of OAO GAZ and ZMZ, the APRS-40M well-workover unit, the KM-1214 truck-mounted crane, the MU-80 TP manipulator crane, PVC-based roofing materials, and petrochemical solvents[1]. This is a set typical of an early-2000s intermediary trading office: no production of its own is claimed anywhere in the list, yet it gathers items at once for oil workers, builders, utility services, and auto repair shops, with roofing materials and solvents sitting right next to a drilling unit.
A separate line in the list — spare parts for OAO GAZ and ZMZ — shows the assortment leaning on Nizhny Novgorod machine-building, while the office itself sat in Nizhny Novgorod, on Vatutina Street[1].
Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet
The site entered our census from the directory listing of nn.ru; the description there read: "products for the oil and gas extraction, light industry, construction, automotive manufacturing, utilities, and consumer goods sectors." The site does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru rating that we have, and no votes for it are recorded in our data. The published results table of the 2004 Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day vote mentions neither the address rosal.r52.ru nor the name "ROSAL"[3].
This is an ordinary standing for a corporate calling-card site in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of that era: such sites did not compete for visitor numbers, and their audience was a few dozen procurement staff who needed a phone number and a list of items. The collection of data from which this article is drawn is described in the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.
How it closed
There is no closing date for the site in the available materials. Something else is telling: a snapshot taken by the web archive on December 13, 2019, shows the page still carrying the same 2001 copyright and the same phone number (8312) 44-03-28[1] — for nearly two decades the caption at the bottom of the home page never changed, even though the domain kept responding. The last snapshot of the home page is dated June 13, 2022, and the web archive now delivers its body unreadable — no coherent text can be extracted from it[2]. As of the compiling of this census, the domain rosal.r52.ru does not open.
Sources
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2019 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Home page, 2022 (archive)
- web.archive.org — Results of the Day of the Nizhny Novgorod Internet vote, 2004 (archive)