Monday, April 18, 2005

The New York Times > Technology > It's Moore's Law, but Another Had the Idea First

The New York Times > Technology > It's Moore's Law, but Another Had the Idea First: "Named Moore's Law several years later by the physicist Carver Mead, that simple observation has proven to be the bulwark of the world's most remarkable industry.
Yet Mr. Moore was not the only one - or even the first - to observe the so-called scaling effect that has led to the exponential acceleration of computing power that is now expected to continue at least for the next decade.
Before Mr. Moore's magazine article precisely plotted the increase in the number of transistors on a chip, beginning with 1, the computer scientist Douglas C. Engelbart had made a similar observation at the very dawn of the integrated-circuit era. Mr. Moore had heard Mr. Engelbart lecture on the subject, possibly in 1960.
Mr. Engelbart would later be hailed as the inventor of the computer mouse as well as the leading developer of many technologies that underlie both the personal computer industry and the Internet."

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