vcomputer.euro.ru was the website of the Nizhny Novgorod computer firm "Vage Computer," which sold computers, components, and peripherals "from a wholesale base at retail prices"[1]. The site was known to the Nizhny Novgorod directory nn.ru, where it was listed in the "/rub/" section[1]. The earliest surviving snapshot is dated May 2002, and the latest is December 2005[1][3].

What the site looked like and what it offered

The home page was arranged as a typical storefront site of the early 2000s: a menu of sections — "Price List," "Guest Book," "Pager & SMS," "Build a Computer," "Forum," "Home," "Components"[1]. The "special offers" showcase featured, at various times, a Mustek 1200CU USB scanner and a Lexmark Z22 printer, as well as a complete computer built on an Intel Pentium IV — "Intel P4 1.5 / PC Partner 237 i845D / DDR 128Mb Hyundai 266MHz / 20Gb Maxtor 7200 / GeForce 2MX200 32Mb" — priced at 480 dollars at an exchange rate of "31.4 rubles" to the dollar, as the home page stated[1]. The full parts catalog was divided into processors, memory, hard drives, video adapters, CD-ROM and CD-RW drives, network cards, monitors, motherboards, keyboards, sound cards, mice, cases, FDD drives, and peripherals — printers, speakers, modems, scanners, faxes, and telephones[1].

For contact, the firm listed Nizhny Novgorod phone numbers with the 8312 area code — "(8312) 68-99-56" and "(83145) 3-41-26" — as well as a mobile number, "8-903-601-30-66," and the email addresses vage@sinn.ru and supvir@mail.ru[1]. Among the page's keywords was Kstovo, a suburb of Nizhny Novgorod to which the firm's trade apparently also extended[1]. The site's news section had been running since at least late 2001: on November 25, 2001, it announced the launch of the guest book; on November 30, the opening of an advertising section; on December 8, weekly (Saturday) price updates; on December 23, a New Year greeting to customers; and on January 27, 2002, a site update and "another price cut," as the home page reported[1]. By the 2004 snapshot, the page's content — including the same product range and the same news items — had not changed; only the date in the header had been updated, to "10.06.02"[2].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

According to Counter.nn.ru, the site's rating was 29.0, with a combined score of 51.0[1]; no votes for it are recorded in our data for the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day. The site was noted in the Nizhny Novgorod subject directory nn.ru, in the computer trade section ("/rub/")[1] — this entry is the main evidence of its place in the Nizhny Novgorod Internet of that era.

How it closed

The site remained unchanged for several years: the December 2005 snapshot still shows the same price list, the same menu, and the same 2001-2002 news items[3]. Since 2005, the domain euro.ru, on whose subdomain the site was hosted, has been in a parked state; in later Web Archive snapshots (as of 2022), requests to vcomputer.euro.ru redirected to euro.ru, and the euro.ru domain itself ended up with a registrar, for sale. No substantive site updates after 2004 are recorded in the material collected.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2002 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2004 (archive)
  3. web.archive.org — Home page, 2005 (archive)