General Knowledge!

[BFM_Edison]

I don't think even Enoch has enough dough for the amount it would cost.

[BFM_Kiwi]

How do you come up with 35 million dollars?

[jim360]

Win the lottery five times.

[BFM_Kiwi]

LOL.   

[jim360]

Back to the question ... one of my tutors at university talked about how hard it was back in the early seventies to get funding for just a few (maybe about a hundred at most) kB of memory. So that's maybe £500 back then or in the low thousands now.

If he were looking at 1TB which is, of course, 10⁹kB then that would suggest around ... £5,000,000,000 ? Crikey. And that's not even taking into account inflation.

So my answer for 1971 is £5,000 million without inflation.

So to get to 1981 I'll just arbitrarily divide that by about 100 (taking Moore's law into account).

£50 million ?

[Marty]

It's somewhere between £500'000'000'000'000'000'000 and 48p.

[Lucky]

How do you come up with 35 million dollars?

Considering the amount (or lack thereof) of disk space that went on our metaphorical hard disk back in 1981 was very small, enough storage to equal gigabyte alone would have cost thousands.  I estimated about 3,000$, but to be able to combine them all to equal one terabyte would have cost more money for storage space (you'd need a pretty big room), cooling, power, among other things.

I promise you I didn't just guess! 

[BFM_Xtr3me]

well, looks like people are putting thought into these answers.
As for me, i will play the random guessing game,
$684,432.79 give or take a couple of cents

[MrMxyzptlk]

kk.

IBMs first GiB drive was in 1980 and cost US$40,000.  (FYI: It was the size of a refrigerator....  )

It would take 1000 of those drives (NOT 1,024 BTW, since they're already GiB, not GB...)

Ignoring inflation (don't we all?!?  ) that would be 1000 * US$40,000 - or $40M in 1980 dollars.

[BFM_Kiwi]

In 1981 you could buy a 5MB Seagate ST-506 drive for about $1500. 

200 of those would equal a GB, so 200*$1500 = $300,000

1000 of those would equal a TB, so $300,000,000.  Yep, 300 million dollars.  (to adjust for inflation you'd have to at least double that figure)

Or if you use Moore's Law, you can estimate that prices would halve every 18 months.  Over thirty years, that's 20 18-month periods, 2^20 is about a million (in other words, double something 20 times and you'll get about a million).  Multiply a million times the current cost of $100 and you get 100 million. 

Either way it's hundreds of millions of dollars, roughly a million times the current cost of $100.

Similarly, today you can get 8GB of RAM for about $40.   In 1981 you could buy 64KB for $550.   So today you can buy 100,000 times the memory for 1/10th the cost.  Again about a million times more (cue Dr Evil).

Mxy, Lucky and 360 all did very well.  I'll have to give this one to three60 since his answer was around $100 million and he name-dropped Gordon Moore.

[jim360]

Who won Formula 1 in 1997?

[-db-swa]

I needed about 5 seconds for this one

Jacques Villeneuve

[jim360]

Well la di da. Anyway, yes, Jacques Villeneuve won it in 1997. And not in 1993 as some moron thought...

[Lucky]

Three60, don't you know it's impolite to insult people on our forums?  As a long time member here you should know that calling someone a moron is very rude and we don't tolerate it in our community.  I will be talking about this with the higher-ups.

[BFM_Kiwi]

Yeah three60, and btw it's customary to spell it morone.  As in "that guy is a real morone, what a looser"