Happy Anniversary!

Moore's Law on chips marks 40th

Moore's Law, the guiding principle that has driven the computer chip industry, celebrates its 40th birthday this week.

The "law" was adopted after Intel co-founder Gordon Moore wrote in a 1965 article that the number of transistors on a chip would double every 24 months.

Dr Moore said that the next 40 years could be "mind-boggling" and that he wished he could be around to see it.

"I re-read my 1965 article a year or so ago, and I frankly was surprised to see in it that I had predicted home computers as one of these uses for low-cost electronics, but had no idea what it would look like," he told the BBC News website.

He had forgotten about it until a young engineer came to him with the idea to build a home computer, while he was chief at Intel.

I frankly didn't expect it to be at all precise. But in fact it turned out to be much more precise than it had any good reason for being, and a colleagues dubbed it 'Moore's Law'

"I said 'gee that's fine but what would you use it for?'.

"The only application he could think of for it was the housewife putting her recipes on it, and I didn't think that was going to be a powerful enough application."

Read the BBC News article.