AS MOORE’S LAW TURNS 50 – THE REVOLUTION IN COMPUTING IT FORETOLD IS ON THE CUSP OF EVEN MORE-RADICAL PROGRESS

By RC Porter 

April 19, 2015

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“Gordon E. Moore, set out to graph the rapid rate of improvement in semiconductor-chip performance — and ended up discovering the heartbeat of the modern world.”

Michael Malone, a Wall Street Journal writer focusing on technology, has an Op-Ed in this weekend’s (April 18/19, 2015) edition discussing the 50th anniversary of Moore’s Law — and what the future may hold going beyond 2020. In order to figure out where you are going — it is almost always helpful to know — where you began. Mr. Malone writes that “fifty years ago [today] on April 19, 1965, chemist and reluctant entrepreneur, Gordon E. Moore, set out to graph the rapid rate of improvement in semiconductor-chip performance — and ended up discovering the heartbeat of the modern world.”

“That discovery is what became known as “Moore’s Law,” which is the observation that performance (speed, price, size), of integrated circuits, aka microchips, regularly doubled every 18 months. The graph began as an illustration to an article in Electronics Magazine, and it didn’t acquire the name “Moore’s Law,” for another decade,’ Mr. Malone writes. “And, for a decade after that, it remained a topic of interest — mostly inside the semi-conductor industry.”