alt Hacker News> Each terminal cost $1 million (at 1943 values) and weighed more than 50,000 kg (50 tonnes). The first one was housed in the Pentagon, with an extension to the White House. A further 11 terminals were installed at different sites around the world, including one in the sub-sub-basement of Selfridges department store in central London
I've learned that I tend to underestimate how large inflation is for historical values, so I looked this up. $1 million in 1943 is apparently just under $19.5 billion today, which means the full set cost $234 billion. I'm not sure if the US foot the bill for all of them or not, but to make it more concrete, 44 of these would have cost more than entire budget for the Department of Defense for this year.
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1 mil seems like an arbitrary or at least rounded number, and also it's not like you could get one on the market, so maybe it actually didn't cost a million
For comparison, the unit cost of Boeing B-29 Superfortress (manufactured 1943–1946) was $639,188. In total 3,970 B-29s were build.
No, inflation it's $19,476,300 in today's dollars. 19 million not billion.
You're an order of magnitude off: $1M in 1943 is ~$19.5M today.
Others noted this should be $19m, not billion. That said, often a more useful analysis is percent of GDP -- this can give a sense of what fraction of effort of the total economy went into it. On those terms, 1943 GDP: $200bn, 2025 GDP: $30tn, for an increase of 150x.
So, depending on how you count, these were $19-150m each in today's dollars, or between 1/10 and 1/3 of an ASML EUV machine.