1994: A Server in a Friend’s Trunk.
We needed a computer we could not afford. A friend at IBM had one in his car.
The Creator's Journey · Chapter VI, Seeing the Shift
In 1994 we wanted to put financial information inside a web browser. To put a service on the web, you needed a Unix machine, and both kinds were very expensive.
Ed Samuel, a dear friend from Carnegie Mellon, was in sales at IBM. “I have an RS/6000 in the trunk of my car that I use,” he said. “You guys can borrow it for a while, until you can afford one.”
That is how NETworth got on the web. As far as I have been able to verify, it was the first commercial stock quote server on the internet. It ran on a borrowed machine that had been riding around in a friend’s trunk.
When the thing you need looks too big to ask for, ask anyway.