Happy birthday

AP

Moore the merrier

IN APRIL 1965, the worldwide semiconductor industry had annual revenues of about $2 billion. It would be three more years before Gordon Moore, an electronics boffin, co-founded a company called Intel. Electronics Magazine, a publication that Mr Moore remembers as “one of the throw-away journals”, asked him to opine on a trend or two. So he did. In prose that was passable for a numbers guy, Mr Moore imagined the possibility of “home computers” and “electronic watches”. Oh, and he “blindly extrapolated” from progress he had noticed in the preceding years that the number of “components” (by which he meant transistors and resistors) on a silicon chip would probably keep doubling every year or so.

“It turned out to be much more accurate than it had any reason to be,” snickers Mr Moore today, 40 years on, savouring the understatement. His off-the-cuff guess held true and, in the 1970s, was dubbed “Moore's Law” by his friend Carver Mead. Mr Moore could not bring himself to utter the phrase for about 20 years, he says. Yet as his “law” became famous he found himself compelled to update it. In 1975, he projected a doubling only every two years. He is adamant that he himself never said “every 18 months”, but that is how it has been quoted, and proven correct, ever since.

All this is somewhat beside the point. Mr Moore's message has always been simpler: that the cost of computation, and all electronics, appeared certain to plummet, and still does today, thus allowing all sorts of other progress. And, indeed, for four decades, Moore's Law has served as shorthand for the rise of Silicon Valley, the boom in PCs (which even surprised Mr Moore, who had forgotten that he had predicted home computers), the dotcom boom, the information super-highway, and other exciting things.

Reflecting on it today, as chairman emeritus of Intel, the largest firm in a global industry 100 times bigger than it was in 1965, is clearly fun. Software “frustrates” Mr Moore, who spends half his time in Hawaii, playing online games and such. But his law seems safe for at least another decade—or two to three chip generations—which is as far as he has ever dared to look into the future. As things are made at scales approaching individual atoms, he says, there will surely be limitations. Then again, the law has often met obstacles that appeared insurmountable, before soon surmounting them. In that sense, Mr Moore says, he now sees his law as more beautiful than he had realised. “Moore's Law is a violation of Murphy's Law. Everything gets better and better.”