The AlterVistas history is an exciting tale of two best mates living in the United Kingdom and their quest to catalogue the bizarre side of the internet.

 

The AlterVistas quest began in the later summer of 2000 during a university gap year when a Bournemouth company decided to give two computing students Benjamin Fryer and Peter Strange an office job together developing websites. This brought them the use of a high speed internet connection and a heightened sense of boredom, which combined gave birth to Ben and Pete’s site of the day.

Everyday on arrival to work a small internet browsing window hidden from the prying eyes of the employer was created on each machine. This window was then used to browse the net in search for sites that gave us some form of entertainment, competing with each other to find the site of day.

The sites became a reflection of Ben and Pete’s combined sense of humour and interest in how the internet the largest database of knowledge know to man can give provide an incite into the bizarre side of humanity.

As the list of sites grew we decided to develop a website in which we could not only share with you our findings but also run our own experiments on humanity. The name AlterVistas was chosen because it means "different views", the essence of the site being that it gives an abstract take on a range of subjects.

 

The AlterVistas site quickly mutated from a list of Ben and Pete’s site of the day to a full blown web porthole with search engine and directory. They where amazed at the amount of traffic that started to arrive and the number of people out there who shared their sense of humour and interest in the bizarre side of the web.

The site thrived and built up a strong fan base supporting the quest submitting sites and questions to the newly created AlterCensus.

 

This period of AlterVistas history began somewhere in early 2002 and is a sad one. The site suffered from a massive amount of neglect. People lost faith in the AlterVistas project, and as time went on the sites traffic slowly dropped and the number of broken links grew.

This was a busy time in the creators life’s trying to balance busy social life’s with passing their boring computing degrees, a act that failed leaving them although highly skilled, unemployed and degreeless. The AlterVistas site was moved from server to server staying alive by the skin of its teeth and the future of the site looked bleak.

 

It did not take long for the amazing talent and skills of Ben and Pete to be recognized and by the beginning of 2004 they where both working themselves up the ranks of technology companies enjoying good salaries.

In late 2004 after a near fatal hosting disaster Ben encouraged by new hostting and some old fan mail, sat down for a weekend and completely re-wrote the now three year old software that powered the site and the next generation of AlterVistas was born.

 

Ben currently lives in Bristol and is in the process of setting up his own business after recently quitting his multifunctional job of IT manager, developer, and designer for small internet company mostly concerned with premium rate phone numbers and pornography.

Pete still lives in Bournemouth writing clever software for printers and helps out with moderating AlterVists massive wealth of strange and fascinating data.

AlterVistas currently lives safely on Bens own dedicated web server and is being developed as part of his new business.

 

AlterVistas is now at last back on track to becoming the internet's centre of oddness. The future is set to be a bizarre one, our mission to boldly go where no search engine has gone before. As we feed the porthole more and more weird and wonderful information who can tell what will happen.