NYT 2007/2008 EC2 archive job — one engineer ran OCR on the paper's scanned archive on a personal credit card for ~$200

Claim: The New York Times 2007/2008 use of EC2 — a single engineer ran OCR over the paper's scanned archive on a personal credit card for ~$200. A documented, public illustration that compute-heavy work that was "cost-prohibitive" became trivially affordable.

Source: GeekWire AWS history.

Confidence: Verified.

Why this matters for Candid: The single best worked example of "the floor fell" — a task that would have required a six-figure capex purchase the year before became a $200 weekend project. Anchors the "real work, real cheap" framing in any cost-floor article.