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Issue 66

From Issue #66
October 1999

Oct 01, 1999  By Doc Searls
 in
Strictly On-Line, LJ Index and more.
LJ INDEX—October, 1999

  • Year Alan Turing wrote Computing Machinery and Intelligence: 1950

  • Turing estimated the binary digit storage capacity of the human brain to be: 1010

  • Number of years Turing estimated would pass before computer storage would reach 109: 50

  • Wholesale price of a 109 (1GB) hard drive in August 1999: $150 US

  • Value of the Loebner Prize for the first computer to pass the Turing Test for machine intelligence (i.e., a computer in which the responses to the test are indistinguishable from a human's): $100,000 US

  • Year the Loebner Prize was created: 1990

  • Percent chance given by Turing in 1950 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” on July 27, 1999 to the question “Who is Linus Torvalds?” : 0

  • Year Ask Jeeves, Inc. was founded: 1996

  • Revenue of Ask Jeeves in 1998: $450,000 US

  • 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 US

  • Total exports of the Congo in 1998: $1.2 billion US

  • National budget of Paraguay in 1998: $1.2 billion US

  • 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

  • OS/2 operating system market-share percentage: .5

  • Percent increase in 1998 Linux shipments over 1997: 212

  • Estimated percentage compounded annual growth rate for Linux between 1999 and 2003: 25

  • Estimated millions of Linux customers worldwide: 10

  • Number of e-mails received in August at linux@ssc.com, asking the stock symbol for the company “Linux”: 14

  • Number of times Tux, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, appears in the August issue of Linux Journal: 48

  • Number of years required to build the Biltmore estate in Asheville, NC—the largest house in the U.S.: 6

  • Number of years required to build the Gates family home, referred to as “The House” in Medina, WA: 7

  • Number of square feet at Biltmore Estate: 175,000

  • Number of square feet at “The House”: 66,000

  • Number of square feet at The White House: 67,000

Sources

  1. Computing Machines and Intelligence, Alan M. Turing, www.msu.edu/user/vattervi/turing/premium.html

  2. The Loebner Prize, www.loebner.net/Prizef/loebner-prize.html

  3. Red Herring on Ask Jeeves' debut, www.redherring.com/insider/1999/0702/inv-askjeeves.html

  4. AskJeeves.com, http://www.askjeeves.com/

  5. International Data Corporation (IDC), http://www.idc.com/

  6. Jason Schumaker, LJ staff

  7. The Biltmore, http://www.biltmore.com/

  8. www.usnews.com/usnews/nycu/tech/billgate/gates.htm

______________________

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal

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