In case I was forgettin' how old I am...

40th Anniversary of Moore's Law

And I was there... sorta.. that was 10 years after I built my first transistor project, which was 2 years or so after you could actually 'buy' a transistor.

And at the same time that most consumer items had about ten to twenty five of them; as opposed to the thousands of today.

BTW: Moore worked for Fairchild Semi at the time.. and that's a story in itself, Fairchild is one of those companies that illustrate how to make a name for yourself with innovation and fail in the long run by running your business with MBA's.

And the same goes for even Japanese consumer brands; as related by the reference to 'Busicom' which was a leading brand of hand and desktop calculators but which went bust rather quickly after Texas Instruments and Hewlett-Packard got into the market.

Of those early, pre-Intel, chip and solid state component makers, only Texas Instruments and Motorola have managed to reinvent themselves often enough to stay viable... though both have been on the precipice several times.

While the article says that Moore's Law is approaching the limits of physics, this has been said before... several times. And someone always finds a new way of extending the limits.

 

RE: In case I was forgettin

Is this a scientific principle or a consumer/sales principle?

 

Re: RE: In case I was forgettin

Sorry, I forgot you guys are 'link-averse'! I should have described the focus in the OP.

And, speaking strictly, neither; it's sorta like how many transistors you can get on the head of a pin.
Which I suppose is practical application of 'new science'... which is known as "Technology'.


Though, often as not, it's how to reliably separate the microscopic circuit traces, as much as it is active device density.


There's ALWAYS a market for 'smaller, faster, cheaper' and that is the end result of new chip technology. Which is what I was referring to in the latter preachment... 'good enough' doesnt cut it.

 

RE: Re: RE: In case I was forgettin

Yeah... and I said, 15 years ago that Voice over IP was a stupid waste of bandwidth... not that digital voice over the net was a bad idea, but that IP was an inefficient way to do it.

Go figger... well, I'm past the point where I think I need movies on my phone, and I'm not a gamer... never was... but the technology fascinates me.

One thing I got right, back then... I said that the interstate fiberoptic system was essentially unlimited in capacity.

- - -- - - - - - - -
Home computers WERE envisioned in he sixties.. even before then... but they were seen as doing environmental control jobs; lights, heat, cooling etc. Something that's just NOW starting to go mainstream.

We may yet get that 'flying car'!
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But back then, the typical basic business mainframe had 4K of RAM, a 10 microsecond clock {that's a whopping 100khz!} and MAYBE a random access storage device.. like a magnetic drum, or a state of art disk the size of a large hatbox holding 10 MB of data.

That's the size of the DISK, itself... the thing was spun in a cabinet the size of a large desk.

But there WAS some neat stuff... like a card reader that could pass 2000 punch cards a minute.

 

RE: Re: RE: Re: RE: In case I was forgettin

Company I worked, my dept.. in fact, for tested data over cable in 1983 in Knoxville; it was 4 years before Digital Equip Corp did it with Continental Cable {now T-W} in the Rte 128 corridor.

We tried like hell to get Mead Corp and Viacom to do it in downtown Dayton before that... but never underestimate the power of the old "Ma Bell" {AT&T}