The Memory Guy recently received a question asking where to find Gordon Moore’s famous paper on Moore’s Law. It seems that Moore’s seminal 1965 article is not very easy to find on the web.
I did a little digging myself and found a copy for ready download. It’s still good reading. The Computer History Museum gives access to the original 1965 article. This page also features a follow-up article written ten years later in 1975, and a 1995 thirty-year review of the phenomenon.
All are worth reading.
Back in 2010 I was able to attend the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) in which Moore presented a keynote speech that looked back from an even more distant perspective. A little digging found this presentation on The Engineering and Technology History Wiki in the form of a script and downloadable slides. The presentation is titled “No Exponential is Forever“. Although I know that this keynote was videotaped I can’t seem to find a copy online. If any reader would like to help me with that then I will add that to this post and to the Objective Analysis page that contains these same links.
Moore doesn’t take himself too seriously, and kids around about his bad predictions rather than simply boasting of his accurate ones. What’s interesting, though, is that he acknowledges that Moore’s Law always looks like it’s going to end but never does. In a video of Moore that ASML posted in 2015 he even discusses this.
It’s pretty amazing to consider what Dr. Moore was able to project over 50 years ago, and how his identification of that trend created a rallying cry for the semiconductor industry. We owe him a lot!
