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by adsadadsad 2684 days ago
Altavisa and astalavista for years! Astalavista was for your all your serialz, crackz and porn passwords back in the day of http basic auth and 56.6k modems
5 comments

I had to Google (amusingly) to ensure I had my historical pedantic pet peeve correct (memories can fail us).

It was just 56k. I seem to recall back in the day people appended the ".6" for no apparent reason other than it sorta seemed logical after we had 14.4k, 28.8k, 33.6k, and then.. all of a sudden.. 56k.

(and, if I recall correctly, for technical reasons it was really only 52k, and even then, only if you were lucky, usually it was less.

I seem to recall that the equipment was theoretically capable of 56k but in actual implementation, even a perfect POTS system wouldn't do over 52k, and in the real world, it would usually negotiate lower due to distance from CO, quality and number of connections and equipment in between, etc).

Holy hell I hard forgotten about astalavista. What a great site.
I think its partly the reason Im a software engineer today.
Astalavista! Reminds me of warez listings and downloading Photoshop for days.
The popups. Oh god the popups.
After clicking through 10 ppc links to porn sites to unlock the real redirect
it's spelled cerealz
Serialbox?
warez
Yeah but is it pronounced like "wares" or like "Juarez"?
"Warez" is from "software", so it's meant to be pronounced "wares" https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/us/warez
I know it's wares with a z, but I've always pronounced it "Juarez" in my head. Never gave it a thought until now!
Never gave it a thought until now!

Neither did I! And I'm a bit humored to see other people pronounced it like that too :) I wonder what causes it, regional dialect or something? I'm part-Mexican, grew up bilingual and it just sort of happened without thinking about it, I discovered 'warez', immediately pronounced it "Juarez" (without the Spanish jota inflection) and it took 30 years (today) to learn it's 'wares'.

I had a friend who insisted on saying "juarez". Annoyed the hell out of me! :)
I used to hear both pretty regularly, talking to BBS folks back in the day. Thankfully, nobody really seemed to fight about it like the pronunciation of "GIF"...