Intel co-founder Gordon Moore has died at age 94. His 1965 article “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits” in the trade journal Electronics was more or less the source for what came to be known as Moore’s Law: that silicon chips would double in complexity (or halve in size or cost) steadily into the future at an extremely rapid rate, leading to a world-historical revolution in electronic devices. Nobody paid to much attention to the article at first, but Moore kept evangelizing for his vision of the future until it came true.
Moore’s Law was not a scientific law of nature. Instead, it was prophecy that over time grabbed hold of the imaginations and beliefs of a couple of generations of electrical engineers and helped give them the self-confidence to make this tremendous achievement happen. Moore’s Law socially constructed its own reality.
Moore was a hero.
