[throwaway2037]

    > Funnily enough Arpanet and all that Xerox stuff were like <$50 million (inflation adjusted!) total.

That doesn't say much. The industry was in utter infancy. How much do you think it cost to move Ethernet from 100Mbit/sec to 1GBbit/sec to 10GB to 100GB to 400GB to 800GB? At least one or two orders of magnitude.

How about the cost to build a fab for the Intel 8088 versus a fab that produces 5nm chips running @ 5GHz. Again, at least one or two orders of magnitude.