vc.nn.ru — "Visual C++ Self-Teacher," a personal educational site about programming in Microsoft Visual C++, that operated in the Nizhny Novgorod domain zone nn.ru at the turn of the 1990s–2000s. The site was run by a single person: the signature at the bottom of the home page read "Copyright © 1999–2000 Artem Abramyan"[1]. It entered the Nizhny Novgorod Internet not only through its domain: the site was counted in the local traffic rating Counter.nn.ru under the "Projects" section with a score of 7.97 (data from the Archival study of the Nizhny Novgorod internet from the counter.nn.ru rating for 2000).

What the site offered

The home page opened with a direct address to the reader: "If you want to learn to program in Visual C++ — this site is for you!", as the home page stated[1]. What followed was a list of what a visitor could find there: documentation on C, C++ and Visual C++; lessons "for beginners and not only"; a forum on programming in Microsoft Visual C++; books; ready-made programs discussed in the lessons, and their source code[1].

The tone was personal, not editorial. The author promised: "I will try to update this site as often as possible," and immediately invited anyone willing to help to write to him[1]. A separate line on the home page offered "Advertise on our server"[1].

Forums, books, and the news feed

The right-hand part of the home page held a news feed, which shows what the site lived on in the autumn of 2000. On September 4, 2000, a conference on programming in MS Visual C++ opened[1]. On September 29 a "Books" section appeared, where, as the home page stated, a visitor could "buy the book you need to study Visual C++"[1]. On October 7 a second, broader forum opened — "in it you can ask a question and share your knowledge in the field of programming: HTML, CGI, Pascal, Basic, Visual Basic, Java, PHP, SQL, etc."; the dedicated forum on C, C++ and Visual C++ remained separate and lived at http://www.vc.nn.ru/conf/index.php?pname=vc[1].

The last news item is dated October 13, 2000: books by Philip Hisley "Generating High-Quality Code for Programs Written in C," R. Kmelik and N. Gehani's "Dimensional Analysis in C++," "C++ for Beginners," A. Fedorov's "Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0" and "Visual C++ for Beginners" were added to the "Literature" section[1]. The surviving snapshot was taken on November 30, 2001, but the news feed on it still ended in October 2000 — meaning the site had stood without updates for over a year[1].

Place in the Nizhny Novgorod internet

vc.nn.ru belonged to the layer of personal topical projects that held up the Nizhny Novgorod segment of the network in the late 1990s: not a company and not an editorial outlet, but a single author who gathered lessons, documentation and a forum around one technology. In the counter.nn.ru rating the site was listed under the "Projects" section with a score of 7.97; it did not take part in the voting for the Nizhny Novgorod Internet Day.

Besides the local counter, the site was also registered in an external rating: "Dear friends, this site takes part in the Golden URL rating," the home page said, and right there stood a rating form with the options "5 (Excellent)," "4 (Good)," "3 (Satisfactory)" and "2 (Poor)"[1]. Such a double affiliation — with the Nizhny Novgorod counter and with an all-Russian rating — was typical for sites whose subject (programming) had no regional boundaries, while the hosting and the author were local.

How it closed

No substantive snapshots after 2001 survive in the web archive. By January 6, 2007, the address vc.nn.ru was serving the standard web server stub page: "Test Page for Apache Installation," explaining that the Russian Apache installation had succeeded and that the administrator could replace this page with their own content[2]. This means that by that time the site was no longer on the domain, while the domain itself still pointed to a live but empty server. The last snapshot in the web archive is dated January 6, 2007[2]. At the time of the archival study, the domain vc.nn.ru was not registered.

Sources

  1. web.archive.org — Home page, 2001 (archive)
  2. web.archive.org — Home page, 2007 (archive)