Re: £5000 USB cable
Actually a lot of the work on the CERN experiments is done in other countries, hence the interesting technical problems of relaying all that data. So forget the WWW, CERN has been driving big data for quite a while.
Back in the day AMD brought out the 64 bit Opterons and I was following the interesting discussion threads as people reported on what they were now able to do or asked for help. One from somebody at CERN was something like "Does anybody else have any experience of using a dual Opteron setup with 16 Gbytes of RAM and a 4-gigabyte row MySQL database?"
Nowadays you can easily run that on a thin and light laptop, and CERN I am sure is partly responsible. As late as 2010 I had people patronisingly explain to me that 64 bits wasn't really any better than 32. Because they'd never seen a big data set...