telecom.nnov.ru was the website of Telecom LLC, a Nizhny Novgorod firm that sold, implemented and supported software for accounting, management accounting and document workflow. The Wayback Machine took its first snapshot of the home page on November 25, 1999: the only contacts listed on it were "Telephone, fax (8312) 62-1218" and an email address[1]. Despite the name, the firm had nothing to do with telecommunications services: in every surviving snapshot, Telecom is a software supplier and developer. The site lasted more than twenty years; the last web-archive copies are dated October 7, 2022[2].

Price list and magazine subscription: the 1999 page

In the earliest saved snapshot, the site fit on a single page. Its navigation held only "About the company" and "Price list", with a banner at the top reading "ATTENTION! SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEW MAGAZINE!"[1]. Below came a list of what the firm sold — almost a catalogue of Russian business software from the late 1990s: the integrated accounting and enterprise-management systems from AOZT "Atlant-Inform" (AKKORD 3.xx, AKKORD 5.xx, "Bukhkompleks"), the "Effekt-Ofis" accounting and document-workflow system from IKK "Garant-International", the "Referent" legal-reference system from ZAO "Referent-Servis", the "MultiLex" dictionaries from "MediaLingua", the FineReader text-recognition systems from ABBYY, and the multimedia textbook "History of Russia, 20th Century" from "Clio Soft"[1].

The firm's mailing address was set up on the kis.ru domain[1] — other regional businesses also kept their pages there in those years: in the Nizhny Novgorod Counter.nn.ru ranking, the line above Telecom's belonged to the site of OAO Dzerzhinsk Meat Processing Plant, also hosted on kis.ru[3].

"Software products and systems": the site in the 2000s and 2010s

By 2012 the site had turned into an ordinary corporate one: the headline "Software products and systems", site search, and a left-hand menu made up of two blocks. The "Programs" block held the sections "Management accounting", "Accounting", "Document workflow", "Information security", "ABBYY products" and "Other products"; the "Services" block held "Software sales", "Software development" and "Customer support". Separately there were "Downloads", "News" (current and archive), an FAQ, a "price list", "About the company", "Contacts" and a site map[4].

The content of the home page was pitched like a commercial proposal: as the home page put it, the firm was pleased to offer "outsourcing services — full accounting support for your organization", development of configurations, reports and processing routines on the 1C 7.7 and 1C 8.1 platforms, custom software development to the client's specification, turnkey implementation, warranty support, administration of servers and workstations, and turnkey supply of computer hardware. The list of partners included "Atlant-Inform", "Promyshlennye Informatsionnye Sistemy", "Elektronnye Ofisnye Sistemy", "Garant International", Cognitive Technologies, "Kompas", ALADDIN, ABBYY, Avira and Kaspersky Lab. The same page offered electronic dictionaries for five language pairs — Russian-English, German, French, Italian and Spanish. The footer read "© Design and project by Telecom LLC:: 2008"[4].

By August 2014 the set of sections had shifted slightly: "ABBYY products" was replaced in the menu by "Estimate calculation", and the right-hand column gained a "Weather in Nizhny Novgorod" block from Gismeteo with a two-week forecast. The development platform became 1C 8.2; among the offerings were authentication tools from "Aladdin R.D.", antivirus-protection service-center services from AVIRA, "Wizardsoft" products, and distance learning "in COST ESTIMATION and SYSTEM ADMINISTRATION" from the Institute of Applied Automation and Programming in St. Petersburg. The footer credit was updated to 2012[5]. The snapshot from November 22, 2015 repeats the 2014 page word for word[6].

A place in the The Internet

Telecom was exactly as visible as a small firm's website tends to be. In the Counter.nn.ru ranking as of September 30, 2000, it held line 110 of the "Firms (Enterprises)" section: the "Counter" column showed 441, the "Rating" column showed 1.53[3]. In the overall ranking of all sites hooked up to the counter, that put it at line 367[7]. For more on how this source works, see the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating.

In the nn.ru portal's directory the site had been listed since mid-2000: in the "Firms (Enterprises): Computers and office equipment" section it appeared under the name "Telecom" with the description "Electronic audit systems" and a "Working" mark dated July 25, 2000[8]. Later the description changed to "Programs for business, management, accounting, study", and the listing ended up in two sections at once. By April 2002, in the "Workstations, accounting and warehouse software, analytics" section, Telecom's "Rating: 3.5" was half that of the neighboring "Tsentrpriborservis" (7.54)[9]. By September 2003, in the "Software development" section, the figure had risen to 5[10]. That is a typical scale for a business site of the time: a handful of daily visits, a directory listing and a counter in the footer — the whole visible life of a site in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet.

How it closed

The site barely changed over its last seven years. In the January 5, 2022 snapshot, the same menus, the same Gismeteo block and the same outsourcing pitch were still there; only the footer credit had been updated, to "2020"[11]. The web archive took its last copies on October 7, 2022[2]; no later saved versions of the page exist, and today the site at telecom.nnov.ru does not open. Where Telecom LLC itself went, the archived snapshots do not say: between the first page of 1999, with its phone number in the "(8312)" format, and the last page of 2022, lay twenty-three years of work by one Nizhny Novgorod firm that sold other people's software and wrote its own.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 1999 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, last snapshot, 2022 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — counter.nn.ru ranking, «Firms (Enterprises)» section, 2000 (archive)
  4. web.archive.org — Home page, 2012 (archive)
  5. web.archive.org — Home page, 2014 (archive)
  6. web.archive.org — Home page, 2015 (archive)
  7. web.archive.org — Overall counter.nn.ru ranking, 2000 (archive)
  8. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, «Firms (Enterprises): Computers and office equipment», 2000 (archive)
  9. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, «Workstations, accounting and warehouse software, analytics», 2002 (archive)
  10. web.archive.org — nn.ru directory, «Software development», 2003 (archive)
  11. web.archive.org — Home page, 2022 (archive)