Gordon Moore

Gordon Earle Moore (1929–2023) joined Shockley Semiconductor in 1956, left the following year with Robert Noyce and six colleagues to found Fairchild Semiconductor, and in 1968 co-founded Intel. He is remembered less for any of that than for four pages in a trade magazine.

1965

As Fairchild’s director of research and development, Moore was asked to predict the next ten years of the semiconductor industry. His internal paper, "The Future of Integrated Electronics," was edited down and published as "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits" in Electronics on April 19, 1965.

He was writing partly to sell chips — the argument that complexity would keep getting cheaper was good for Fairchild. He did not call it a law; Carver Mead did, later. See Moore’s Law for the projection itself and what the industry made of it.

The room in 1960

Five years earlier, Moore had been in the audience at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference when Douglas Engelbart presented Microelectronics and the Art of Similitude — a paper making a broader version of the scaling argument. John Markoff surfaced the connection in The New York Times in 2005, for the law’s fortieth anniversary.

The point is not that Moore borrowed anything. It is that two men heard the same fact about scale and took different halves of it, and the industry followed the one that came with a schedule.