Is FIFTY years old…
The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. 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.
G. Moore, 1965
Gordon Moore was the R&D lead for Fairchild Semiconductor before becoming a founder of a little company called NM which morphed into another little company called Intel with Robert Noyce. They were later joined by Andrew Grove. 
Image: Wikipedia
While Moore has been credited with the comments about increasing performance as part of Moore’s Law, it was actually David House, an Intel employee that looked at the increasing performance of transistors and said that integrated circuits would double in performance every 18 months.
The whole development of transistors, through MOS-Fet, CMOS, processors, and circuits. It reads like a spy novel more than a history of development with companies suing other companies, people moving between companies, ‘trade secrets’ moving, etc. It’s a real time sink for geeks if you start down that road…LOL
And twenty years ago they predicted the end because of electron tunnelling constraints.
Very interesting. I must admit you are talking in a whole new language for me. LOL
I worked for the Army Security Agency in 1976, and our facility in Gablingen, Germany used a computer system called ‘LaFine Wine.’ It was a main frame whose hardware was housed in a room the size of a typical Ace Hardware store, and that area had to be temp controlled to around 65 degrees 24 hours a day.
It served maybe 200 work stations, and each work station had a green screen and a terminal with four functions, F1 – F4. It was little more than a small data base and word processor.
That same performance of that monster in 1976 can now be reproduced by an Apple iPad.
It appears that Moore’s Law has held up over these last 39 years.
Ed- That they did… LOL
Fargo- It’s geek speak… 🙂
Fredd- Yep, it was a DEC System… 🙂
I won’t say where, but I’ve seen line developments halted and radically changed mid-stream because the product would be obsolete by the time the first chip rolled out the door.
It was good meeting you that Saturday morning in Nashville, and thanks again for the autographed copy.
A machinist friend in Silicon Valley once remarked that he was never so busy making such tiny parts for things, and getting smaller. Another writer-friend was working for a Big Guy named Gordon-something, writing a book about the history of the Semiconductor Industry…and kept running into complete brick-walls when he tried to get simple number-data, like how many semiconductors were produced in X-year etc. by XYZ-Corp. Absolute stonewalling.
Alien- True dat! It was great to meet you also, and I hope you enjoy it!
NC- Not surprised… LOL You’ll never see the ‘real’ numbers… EVER!
Hoo boy! My first computer exposure was the Interdata 7/16 at Augsburg American HS in 1980. I’ve written Z80 and 6502 assembler, and recognize most of those processors on that graph.
Nothing like computer history to make me feel old!
Eric- LOL, how do you think ‘I’ feel… My first programming was punch cards on an 1190 for an IBM 360 running Fortran.