The slender smartphone you’re carrying in your pocket has more computing power than NASA needed to put a man on the moon. If you’re looking for someone to thank for that technological miracle, you can start with Gordon Moore.



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Intel’s original microprocessor, the 4004. (Intel)

This Sunday marks the 50th anniversary of “Moore’s Law,” a dictum that has guided the technological revolution from the earliest days of silicon through the iPhone 6.

On April 19, 1965, Gordon Moore — then director of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor — published an article in an industry trade journal with the informal title, “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits.”

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In the Electronics article, Moore noted the exponential growth in the development of silicon and made a bold prediction: The density of electronic circuits would double every year, while the cost of producing them would drop at a similar rate. In 10 years, he surmised, we would see as many as 65,000 transistors crammed onto a single chip.

Here’s what Moore wrote in 1965:

“Integrated circuits will lead to such wonders as home computers – or at least terminals connected to a central computer – automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications equipment. The electronic wristwatch needs only a display to be feasible today.”

Moore’s vision was more spot-on than anyone could have imagined.

Moore is more

In the year Moore’s article appeared, Sylvania manufactured the first read-only memory (ROM) chips. They held a whopping 256 bits of data (enough to hold 32 characters, or about one-quarter of a tweet) and were programmed one bit at a time by a technician who carved the connections into the chip by hand.

Three years later, Moore and Robert Noyce left Fairchild to form a new company. They called it Intel. In 1971, Intel released its first general-purpose microprocessor: the 4004. It was the size of a thumbnail and held a whopping 2,300 transistors. Today’s Intel Broadwell-U processor is roughly the same size yet holds nearly 2 billion transistors. The chip costs one-60,000th as much to produce.

To honor the 50th anniversary of Moore’s observation, Intel released a series of brain-melting comparisons to what would have happened to other industries if they had followed the same growth trajectory.

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