Liberal Arts Blog — Gordon Moore (1929–2023): The Law of Smaller, Faster, Cheaper, Better
Liberal Arts Blog — Wednesday is the Joy of Science, Engineering, and Technology Day
Today’s Topic — Gordon Moore (1929–2023): The Law of Smaller, Faster, Cheaper, Better
With a PhD in chemistry from Caltech, Gordon Moore, the son of a county sheriff, was one of the “traitorous eight” who left Shockley Semiconductor to form Fairchild Semiconductor in 1958. In 1965, Moore and Robert Noyce founded NM Electronics which became Intel Corporation, of which Moore was chairman and CEO from 1979 to 1987. He is most famous for “Moore’s Law” which started out as the empirical observation that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit roughly doubles every two years and the prediction that it would continue to do so. The graph is a picture of capitalism on steroids. The invisible hand in overdrive. Experts — please chime in. Correct, elaborate, elucidate.
THE ORIGINAL GORDON MOORE PREDICTION (1965)
1. “The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year.”
2. “Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase.”
3. “Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.”
NB: A later spin: “If the auto industry advanced as rapidly as the semiconductor industry, a Rolls Royce would get half a million miles per gallon, and it would be cheaper to throw it away than to park it.”
ENGINEERING, FAILURE, LEADERSHIP — a few Gordon Moore quotes
1. “Engineering is a series of failures with an occasional success.”
2. “Failures are not something to be avoided. You want to have them happen as quickly as you can so you can make progress rapidly.”
3. “One thing a leader does is remove the stigma of mistakes.”
NB: “If you asked me in 1980 what the big impact of microprocessors would be, I probably would have missed the PC. If you asked me in 1990 what was important, I probably would have missed the Internet.”
MOORE’S LEGACY — “a self-fulfilling prophecy” + industry dominance
1. “Innovation in electronics has as much to do with vision as it does with tinkering, and Gordon Moore saw the future better than anyone else in the last 50 years.” (Michael S. Malone, author of “The Intel Trinity”)
2. “The industry didn’t measure its performance by Moore’s Law. it designed and targeted its goals based on it, turning the law into a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
3. “With its silicon microprocessors, the brains of a computer, Intel enabled American manufacturers in the mid-1980s to regain the lead in the vast computer data-processing field from their formidable Japanese competitors.”
NB: By the ’90s, Intel had placed its microprocessors in 80 percent of the computers that were being made worldwide, becoming the most successful semiconductor company in history.”
FINAL WORD — Gordon Moore (1973)
“We are really the revolutionaries in the world today — not the kids with long hair and beards who were wrecking the schools a few years ago.”
Gordon E. Moore, Intel Co-Founder Behind Moore’s Law, Dies at 94
Moore’s Law Running Out of Room, Tech Looks for a Successor (Published 2016)
Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley pioneer who co-founded Intel, dies at 94
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
“Make your own Bible. Select and collect all the words and sentences that in all your readings have been to you like the blast of a trumpet.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson
My spin — then periodically review, re-rank, and exchange your list with those you love. I call this the “Orion Exchange” because seven is about as many as any human can digest at a time. Game?
A LINK TO THE LAST FOUR YEARS OF POSTS ORGANIZED BY THEME:
PDF with headlines — Google Drive
ATTACHMENT BELOWS -
#1 A graphic guide to justice (9 metaphors on one page).
#2 “39 Songs, Prayers, and Poems: the Keys to the Hearts of Seven Billion People” — Adams House Senior Common Room Presentation, 11/17/20
YOUR TURN
Please share the coolest thing you learned this week related to science, engineering, or technology. Or, even better, the coolest or most important thing you learned in your life related to science and engineering.
This is your chance to make someone else’s day. Or to cement in your mind something that you might otherwise forget. Or to think more deeply about something dear to your heart. Continuity is key to depth of thought.
