Digital Alpha, UNIX, StorageWorks to Power Lycos, World's Largest WEB Index of More Than 55 Million URLs

Supercharged CentiSpeed Search uses Digital's 64-bit technology

MAYNARD, Mass., July 22, 1996 -- Digital Equipment Corporation today announced that Lycos Inc. (NASDAQ: LCOS), of Marlboro, Mass., a premier Internet search and guide company, will power the Lycos free World Wide Web service with Digital's 64-bit Alpha systems, 64-bit Digital UNIX operating system, and StorageWorks data storage technology.

The Digital solution includes AlphaServer 8400 enterprise systems, AlphaStation 200 workstations, 320 gigabytes of StorageWorks, and DECsafe high-availability clustering software. The Lycos Web site (http://www.lycos.com) serves more than 100 million Internet requests for information each month and boasts a query growth rate of nearly 2,000 percent annually.

According to Lycos President and CEO Robert J. Davis, "As our business sky-rocketed, the Alpha machines came along at just the right time. Alpha has the power and expandability to keep up with the exponential growth companies like Lycos derive from the Internet. Running on the Alpha platform, our new CentiSpeed technology provides users with four times the speed of other tools in the marketplace, and high relevancy in their Internet searches."

Mike Gallup, Digital vice president of worldwide systems marketing, said, "We're pleased that Lycos, with its supercharged speed and relevancy searching capabilities, has chosen Digital technology to implement CentiSpeed. Lycos' experience is a good example of the reasons more and more companies are moving their Internet operations to Alpha, the 21st century superpower. Today Digital provides a complete 64-bit environment - systems, operating systems, databases, thousands of applications, and complete support and service resources."

Lycos' Unique Search and Indexing Technology

Lycos delivers exceptional relevancy in response to users' queries--made possible by patent-pending spidering and indexing technology--making it more likely than other search tools to provide an Internet explorer with the results that he or she is looking for. The new CentiSpeed technology enhancements bolster Lycos' reputation as a powerful and comprehensive Internet search tool. Lycos is one of the Web's most visited sites, and one of the most popular search services, with an estimated 11 million users worldwide.

Besides its spidering technology for topic- or word-specific searching, the Lycos services include Point Reviews, critical assessments of web sites; and the a2z directory of sites, organized in 16 popular categories and hundreds of sub-categories, for easy browsing through topics of information available on the Internet. The URLs contained in a2z are the Net's most popular - those with the greatest number of external links pointing to them from other sites - and therefore bear the Web community's own endorsement of their content and value. The Lycos services can be found on the Web at http://www.lycos.com.

Lycos, Inc., an Internet exploration company, was founded specifically to find, index and filter information on the Internet and World Wide Web. CMG Information Services, Inc. (NASDAQ: CMGI) is a majority shareholder in Lycos, Inc. through its strategic investment and development business unit, CMG@Ventures. CMGI is a leading provider of direct marketing services investing in and integrating advanced Internet, interactive media and database management technologies.

Powerful Servers, Workstations and Storage Technology

Digital's VLM64 technology dramatically improves database and application performance by raising the amount of information that can be stored in memory. All 32-bit systems are limited to 2GB of memory. Today AlphaServer 8400 systems can store up to 14GB of data in memory, with more in the future.

Alpha systems continue to set the standard in database and application performance and price/performance. For example, readers of Computerworld recently rated the AlphaServer 8000 line highest in overall user satisfaction, compared with systems from IBM, HP, and Sun. Datamation named the AlphaServer 8400 enterprise system "1996 server of the Year." BYTE Magazine named the AlphaServer 1000 4/266 best overall Internet server platform, ahead of systems from SGI, Sun, Intergraph and others. Digital continues to dominate the UNIX-based AIM Hot Iron Awards. And a cluster of AlphaServer 8400 systems recently smashed the industry-standard TPC-C performance benchmark record with 30,390 tpmC at $305/tpmC.

The StorageWorks product line is a comprehensive family of disk, tape and optical storage subsystems, offering modular, competitively- priced, industry-standard solutions in customizable desktop, deskside, departmental, and datacenter enclosures. StorageWorks products are available on multiple operating systems and hardware platforms, including Digital, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun workstations and servers, and Windows NT and Novell environments.

Digital Equipment Corporation is the world's leader in open client/server solutions from personal computing to integrated worldwide information systems. Digital's scalable Alpha platforms, storage, networking, software and services, together with industry- focused solutions from business partners, help organizations compete and win in today's global marketplace.

Note to Editors: Digital, AlphaServer, DECsafe and the Digital logo are trademarks of Digital Equipment Corporation. The Lycos "Catalog of the Internet" Copyright 1994, 1995, 1996 Carnegie Mellon University. Lycos is a trademark of Carnegie Mellon University. a2z is a service mark of Lycos, Inc. Point and Point Reviews are service marks of Point Communications Corporation, a wholly-owned Lycos subsidiary. UNIX is a registered trademark in the United States and other countries licensed exclusively through X/Open Company Limited.