Thoughts on Gordon Moore

 Gordon Moore passed away on March 24, 2023. He was 94 years old. 

He is best known for the article 

Cramming more components onto integrated circuits. 

It appeared in the magazine Electronics (it is now defunct), Volume 38, No. 8, April 19, 1965. Do you need to track it down in the basement of your library. No. Its here and here. I wonder if Moore would have predicted that his article would be available easily over 50 years later. Or is it? Link rot is a serious problem so you might want to download it to your local files. Note that the first link is some sort of official version and the second version is my local version. Not clear which link will rot first. The article also has an addition which is an interview with Moore that was done later.

In the article Moore said that the number of components-per-circuit (I think that means chip) will double every year. Moore credits Dave House with modifying it to `doubling every 18 months' and Carver Mead with calling it `Moore's Law'.  Later it came to be quoted as computer SPEED would double every 18 months. We will take this to be Moore's Law in this blog post. 

Is Moore's law dead? Browsing Google the answer seems to be that it is slowing down but not dead yet. (IDEA for a comedy sketch: Redo the Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch about the death of Moore's law.) 

If Moore had 1 penny in April 1965 and it doubled every 18 months then how rich would he be now? How rich was he in April 2022? Compare the two numbers.