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From: art@cs.bu.edu (Al Thompson)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Moore's Law
Message-ID: <51751@bu.edu.bu.edu>
Date: 6 Feb 90 17:08:21 GMT
References: <1461@east.East.Sun.COM>
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Reply-To: art@cs.bu.edu (Al Thompson)
Organization: Boston University
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In article <1461@east.East.Sun.COM> sgolson@pyrite.East.Sun.COM (Steve Golson) writes:
|(originally posted to comp.lsi, with no replies)
|
|When did Gordon Moore first postulate Moore's Law? Quoting from 
|"Computer Structures" by Siewiorek, Bell, and Newell p. 64:
|
|	In 1964, Gorden [sic] E. Moore, then director of research at
|	Fairchild Semiconductor, predicted that the component count per
|	IC chip would double every year.
|
|Unfortunately there is no reference. Anyone have a definitive answer?

Ah, but there is a reference.  I've been meaning to post this for a while,
but just now got around to it.

The following is quoted from:  T.R. Reid, 1984, "The Chip", Simon and
Schuster, New York.  pp 123-124.

"Noyce's friend and colleague, Gordon Moore, was asked in 1964-when the
most advanced chips contained about 60 components-to predict how far the
industry would advance in the next decade.  'I did it sort tongue in
cheek,' Moore recalled later.  'I just noticed that the number of
transistors on a chip had doubled for each of the last three years, so I
said the rate would continue.'  To his dismay, that off-the-cuff
prediction was widely quoted and soon came to be known as 'Moore's law'.
To his astonishment, the law held up well into the 1970's.  'At that time,
I had no idea that anybody would expect us to keep doubling [capacity] for
ten more years.  If you extrapolated out to 1975, that would mean we'd
have 65,000 transistors on a single integrated circuit.  It just seemed
ridiculous.'  By 1975 the industry was producing a new series of memory
chips that contained 65,536 tansistors.  'It amazes me,' Moore said
recently.  'I still have a tough time believing we can make these
things.'"