A tip of the hat to Scott Epstein for digging this one out of the archives. Scott and I had lunch a few weeks ago and he brought this along for me after seeing my post of the old Excite TV commercials. Sun ran this ad promoting their server and our search engine after Excite’s multi-million dollar purchases of Sun hardware to power the launch of Excite.com in October 1995.
If memory serves, the server we purchased from Sun to handle the search traffic during the launch of Excite was an eight-CPU box with a gig or two of RAM, which cost around $250k, of which $50k – $70k was the price for the RAM alone! Happily, Mr. Moore has been hard at work since then, bringing the price of a gig of RAM down to around $30.