ColdFusion was a breath of fresh air in the mid-to-late '90s when the predominant technologies were CGI/Perl and ASP/VBScript (pre-.NET). I used to love showing

ColdFusion was a breath of fresh air in the mid-to-late '90s when the predominant technologies were CGI/Perl and ASP/VBScript (pre-.NET). I used to love showing other programmers e.g. "Here's how you create a database connection, execute a query, and iterate through a recordset in ASP (40 lines of opaque nonsense)... and here's how you do it in ColdFusion (cfquery, cfloop)." It enabled us to quickly deliver a lot of intranets and e-commerce sites for our customers, but man oh man did it require a lot of server hardware to run (at the time), and it was expensive as heck!