LJ Index — October, 1999
- Year Alan Turing wrote "Computing Machinery and Intelligence": 1950*
- Turing's estimated storage capacity of the human brain in binary digits: 1010
- Number of years Turing estimated would pass before computer storage would reach 109: 50*
- Wholesale price of a 109 (10 gig) hard drive in August 1999: $150*
- Value of the Loebner Prize for the first computer to pass the Turing Test for machine intelligence (i.e. a computer whose responses to the test are indistinguishable from a human's: $100,000*
- Year the Loebner Prize was created: 1990*
- Percent chance given by Turing that a computer would pass his test by the year 2000: 70
- Number of computers thus far to win the big prize: 0*
- Number of correct answers given by "Ask Jeeves" to the question "Who is Linus Torvalds?": 0*
- Year Ask Jeeves, Inc. was founded: 1996*
- Revenue of Ask Jeeves in 1998: $450,000*
- Market capitalization of Ask Jeeves at 4pm on July 2, 1999, at the end of its first day as a publicly traded company: $1.7 billion*
- Total exports of the Congo in 1998: $1.2 billion
- National budget of Paraguay in 1998: $1.2 billion
- Millions of desktop systems at the end of 1998: 89*
- Millions of desktop systems at the end of 1997: 79*
- Windows 95 operating system market share percentage: 57.4*
- Windows 98 operating system market share percentage: 17.2*
- Windows NT operating system market share percentage: 11*
- MacOS operating system market share percentage: 5*
- Linux operating system market share percentage: 2.1*
- Windows 3.11 operating system market share percentage: 1.1*
- UNIX operating system market share percentage: .8*
- OS/2 operating system market share percentage: .5*
- Linux shipments in 1998: 748,000*
- Percent increase in 1998 Linux shipments over 1997: 212*
- Estimated percentage compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) for Linux beteen 1999 and 2003: 25*
- Estimated millions of Linux customers worldwide: 10*
Sources