rto.r52.ru was the website of the Nizhny Novgorod limited liability company "Remtorgoborudovanie" (Retail Equipment Repair), which traded in cash-register equipment. The home page stated that the firm was "known on the Nizhny Novgorod market as a reliable supplier of trade (cash-register) equipment for 5 years already"[1]; the copyright notice in the footer was dated 2001[1], and if these five years are counted back from the copyright date, the firm's start of operations falls in the second half of the 1990s. The first snapshot of the site in the web archive was taken on 5 February 2002, the last on 4 January 2010[4]; the domain no longer exists.

What the firm sold

The only text of the site preserved for us is the "About the company" section describing the product range. By its own description, "Remtorgoborudovanie" was engaged in the sale, installation, and servicing of cash registers and banknote-counting machines, and offered equipment from the foreign manufacturers Sharp and Samsung as well as domestic ones — SAM, KZTA, the Sosensky Instrument-Making Plant, "Iskra," "Schetmash," "Shtrikh-M," "and others"[1]. The market split was stated directly: professional Sharp and Samsung equipment was aimed at "large enterprises and trade-and-procurement organizations," while the domestic models AMS-100 F, Kasbi-02 F, Kasbi-03 F, Astra-100 F, and Astra-200 F were aimed at small and medium business, as "portable and very convenient cash registers for work, for example, at a market"[1].

Separately, the firm claimed a "general right of supply" for equipment made by the Kaluga Telegraph Equipment Plant, which produced the AMS-100 F, Kasbi-02 F, and Kasbi-03 F models[1]. As clients, the page named "Nizhegorodsvyazinform," JSC NAZ "Sokol," and Vozrozhdenie Bank[1] — a list drawn from the firm's own promotional text and not confirmed by other sources. Nizhny Novgorod is also named in the text itself: the page spoke of the "Nizhny Novgorod market" and noted that "cash-register equipment is offered in Nizhny Novgorod by many firms"[1].

How the site was built

Based on the surviving snapshots, the site was a modest business-card page: a connected text about the company and a reference to a price list that gave a "detailed list of the products supplied"[1]. Neither an address nor a phone number appears in the surviving text of the home page[1]. The footer indicates that both the design and the hosting of the site were provided by R52.RU[1] — the same Nizhny Novgorod platform in whose subdomain the site lived.

The three snapshots that made it into our sample — from 5 February 2002[1], 10 December 2003[2], and 26 December 2005[3] — match word for word, down to the phrase about "5 years already" on the market and the 2001 copyright: over nearly four years the text was never rewritten. The other web-archive captures of the domain in our sample are not represented by text, so it cannot be judged from them whether the page changed after 2005.

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

The site entered our Nizhny Novgorod Internet through the nn.ru directory's category listing; the home page opened under the same title — "Remtorgoborudovanie — Repair and sale of cash registers"[1]. The domain does not appear in the surviving samples of the Counter.nn.ru counter, so we have no data on its traffic (see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating).

How it closed

The web archive preserved 27 captures of the site; the last is dated 4 January 2010, with no later copies[4]. The domain no longer exists. What became of the firm itself cannot be traced from the surviving materials: the available snapshots from 2002-2005 are identical and contain no information about a change of address, reorganization, or a move to another domain[3]. What remains of the site is the same text about the company — and the list of cash-register models that the firm offered to Nizhny Novgorod businesses and market traders in the early 2000s: AMS-100 F, "Kasbi," "Astra"[1].

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2003 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Snapshots of rto.r52.ru in the web archive (archive)