One interesting question is: if you started today, would you be able to afford boxes that cost 60k? Or would you do your software some other way that doesn't require 2TB of RAM?

Obviously when you started your stuff didn't need 2TB of RAM. If I read your history correctly I don't think you could even buy a box with 2TB of RAM back then. That's enterprise grade hardware, which today costs a fortune. Back in the day it would be a bigger fortune.

Instead, you probably started the way everyone else did, with maybe a 4GB or 8GB linux box at home then built things up from there and a bunch of curl scripts and a local instance.

So why the resource requirement? An in-ram database?

Mainly curious.