“Well,” said Moore, “I had been looking at integrated circuits — [they] were really new at that time, only a few years old — and they were very expensive. There was a lot of argument as to why they would never be cheap, and I was beginning to see, from my position as head of a laboratory, that the technology was going to go in the direction where we would get more and more stuff on a chip and it would make electronics less expensive. ... I had no idea it was going to turn out to be a relatively precise prediction, but I knew the general trend was in that direction and had to give some kind of a reason why it was important to lower the cost of electronics.”

Can it continue? Every year someone predicts the demise of Moore’s Law, and they’re wrong. With enough good engineers working on it, he hoped, “we won’t hit a dead end. ... It’s [a] unique technology. I can’t see anything really comparable that has gone on for this long a period of time with exponential growth.”

But let’s remember that it was enabled by a group of remarkable scientists and engineers, in an America that did not just brag about being exceptional, but invested in the infrastructure and basic scientific research, and set the audacious goals, to make it so. If we want to create more Moore’s Law-like technologies, we need to invest in the building blocks that produced that America.

Alas today our government is not investing in basic research the way it did when the likes of Moore and Robert Noyce, the co-inventor of the integrated circuit and the other co-founder of Intel, were coming of age.

“I’m disappointed that the federal government seems to be decreasing its support of basic research,” said Moore. “That’s really where these ideas get started. They take a long time to germinate, but eventually they lead to some marvelous advances. Certainly, our whole industry came out of some of the early understanding of the quantum mechanics of some of the materials. I look at what’s happening in the biological area, which is the result of looking more detailed at the way life works, looking at the structure of the genes and one thing and another. These are all practical applications that are coming out of some very fundamental research, and our position in the world of fundamental science has deteriorated pretty badly. There are several other countries that are spending a significantly higher percentage of their G.N.P. than we are on basic science or on science, and ours is becoming less and less basic.”

How did he first get interested in science, I asked?

“My neighbor got a chemistry set and we could make explosives,” he said. “In those days, chemistry sets had some really neat things in them, and I decided about then I wanted to be a chemist not knowing quite what they did, and I continued my work in a home laboratory for some period of time. Got to the point where I was turning out nitroglycerin in small production quantities and turning it to dynamite. ... A couple ounces of dynamite makes a marvelous firecracker. That really got my early interest in it. You couldn’t duplicate that today, but there are other opportunities. You know, I look at what some of my grandkids are doing, for example, those robotics and the like. These are spectacular. They’re really making a lot of progress.”

Looking back on Moore’s Law and the power of computing that it has driven, I asked Moore what he thought was its most important contribution over the past 50 years.