The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Forty years of Moore's Law

The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Forty years of Moore's Law: "To put it another way, in 1971 Intel was able to put 2,300 transistors on its first microprocessor. Later this year, the Santa Clara, Calif., chip giant will unveil a processor crammed with 1.7 billion transistors.
'If the automobile industry moved this fast, your car would move at a million miles per hour and it would get 50,000 miles per gallon,' said Moore, 76, in a recent press conference.
But Moore's prediction turned out to be much more than a codification of the exponential speed of technological progress.
'It became an almost religious faith in human ingenuity and a belief in the future,' said Carver Mead, the former professor at the California Institute of Technology who coined the term 'Moore's Law.' 'It spoiled everyone into thinking that this would go on forever.' "