Re:History and evolution of venture capital
by ChuckMcM on Wednesday August 28, 2013 @01:35PM
(#6291426)
So in 1995 I was the Director of Technology for a startup called "GolfWeb." Today that would be something like Ars Technica for golf, but at the time it was this new thing a "web magazine." That really nobody had any clue about.
To serve it up we had a Sun machine that had a list price of $110,000 (we got it for $35,000 and some advertising deal with Sun), our T-1 line (1.544 Mbps bi-directional bandwidth) cost us $3,500 a month. The Cisco router we used on it was another $20,000. Our machine had a whopping 1.2 Gbytes of disk space available for editorial. The coverage of the Masters Tournament in 1996 did over a million page views per day (and nearly smoked our T-1 line). The next bump up was a T-3 line (45 Mbps) and it was $45,000 a month so we needed to get a lot better advertising if we were going to be able to support that cost.
Today you could set up what we had for probably less than $100 a month.
Think about that, in 1995 anywhere from $150,000 - $250,000 a month of "sales money" in terms of infrastructure value in supporting a web site, today about $1,200. Is it at all surprising that Sun is dead and the phone companies are the poorest source of IP transit access?
To serve it up we had a Sun machine that had a list price of $110,000 (we got it for $35,000 and some advertising deal with Sun), our T-1 line (1.544 Mbps bi-directional bandwidth) cost us $3,500 a month. The Cisco router we used on it was another $20,000. Our machine had a whopping 1.2 Gbytes of disk space available for editorial. The coverage of the Masters Tournament in 1996 did over a million page views per day (and nearly smoked our T-1 line). The next bump up was a T-3 line (45 Mbps) and it was $45,000 a month so we needed to get a lot better advertising if we were going to be able to support that cost.
Today you could set up what we had for probably less than $100 a month.
Think about that, in 1995 anywhere from $150,000 - $250,000 a month of "sales money" in terms of infrastructure value in supporting a web site, today about $1,200. Is it at all surprising that Sun is dead and the phone companies are the poorest source of IP transit access?