Posted on 03/05/2018 10:55:15 AM PST by Swordmaker
You have a case, but not a strong one. Yes, Moore initially predicted the doubling of the number of circuits on a chip in a fixed amount of time.Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. The observation is named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, whose 1965 paper described a doubling every year in the number of components per integrated circuit,[2] and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade.[3] In 1975,[4] looking forward to the next decade,[5] he revised the forecast to doubling every two years.[6][7][8] The period is often quoted as 18 months because of Intel executive David House, who predicted that chip performance would double every 18 months (being a combination of the effect of more transistors and the transistors being faster).[9]Moore’s projection has been valid over the past number of decades because there is money to be made in doing the R&D to achieve it. There is money to be made doing that because the market absorbs the geometrically increasing number of transistors being produced.Moore's prediction proved accurate for several decades, and has been used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development.[10] Advancements in digital electronics are strongly linked to Moore's law: quality-adjusted microprocessor prices,[11] memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras.[12] Digital electronics has contributed to world economic growth in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.[13] Moore's law describes a driving force of technological and social change, productivity, and economic growth.[14][15][16][17]
Moore's law is an observation or projection and not a physical or natural law. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
The fact that the price per transistor decreases with the accumulation of more experience producing them is not unique to computer circuitry, tho. Same thing happens in any infant industry, such as cars a century ago. The rule is that the production cost drops by about 25% when you double the quantity of the commodity in question. But you go broke doing that much production if the market saturates. So the real deal is that the demand curve is highly elastic; you make twice as many transistors for the same price, and people buy them all.
If the government had tried, at any time in the past, to legislate the price of transistors which now prevails, the result would have been an instant shortage and then an outright stoppage of production. The supply curve is a function of time.
I started at Ga. Tech in ‘73 with a slide rule
Then my parents gave me a kingly gift...
A HP 45 calculator, cost as much as a used VW Beetle
I was very grateful
The new Neural Engine in Apple's A11 chip that drives the iPhone 8 and iPhone X does up to 600 BILLION calculations per second. . .
and isn’t that obverse to the argument of the morality of dropping the bomb.
Sure, it was horrible but, the alternative was worse....
Like your electronic steering these days.
It has it’s own electric engine to assist you...
I have read that they would try to avoid letting cities get bombed if they could figure out how to let some other action get the credit for discovering the planned action. But if they couldn’t, they’d have to let the city get bombed. I believe Coventry took a pretty big hit.
The deceit that the British were able pull off is something amazing. “The Man Who Never Was” is one. They had also captured every German who parachuted into England. Gave them a choice: work for us or die for you country. They then ran elaborate spy rings giving the Germans 95% accurate info, but the 5% was enough to make the info worthless. They had one spy tell the Germans about Normandy, but only a couple of hours before the landings, so it didn’t really help. Then after the landings had occurred, he sent the message that Normandy was a feint, and that Calais was the real target.
It was a time of balancing operational importance against reliability of the computers. Up time was often measured in minutes or hours before a vacuum tube diode died or a relay stuck.
This article points out that the Harwell Witch was designed to be slow and reliable, trading speed for reliability, but even then four days was about the limit of its operational reliability.
This is akin to the road trips my family used to take in the mid-50s on a Sunday afternoon. It was expected one would get at least one tire problem on a four hour jaunt as par for the course. You never left home without a bumper jack, a spare tire, a patch kit, and tire pump. Now, such an event is almost unheard of. Most people don't bother carrying those pieces of equipment and if they do, they have no clue how to use them if they even know where they are in the car. What's an inner tube?
They probably could not even have produced a gigabyte of ram during the whole year of 1956.
Since Magnetic Core Memory was made by hand 1 bit at a time at a cost of $1 per bit at that time and there would be 8 billion bits in a Gigabyte...
With advancements in quantum computing and graphene production techniques, in less than 10 years, we will likely look at todays devices much the way we in the present day view the computational toddler machines of the 50s.
Back around 1997 I had a conversation with a 94 year old Logan Kansas woman when I stayed at her house while on a pheasant hunting trip to that location.
In a nutshell:
1. House built by father outside town, no glass windows.
2. Witnessed father drilling water well via horse attached to a drilling post....around and around and around......
3. Weekly trips into town via horse and buggy to purchase supplies
4. The dust bowl of the 30's brought nothing but desolation and daily cleaning of the house due to the dust.
5. House was finally hauled into town where it was currently located via mule train, rolled over logs placed along the route.........
My main regret of that hunting trip that yielded no pheasants for my buddy and I, was that it could have been better spent that Saturday and Sunday listing to that living and breathing history book.........She was a treasure trove of information.......
God bless her and what her life allowed her to witness..........
That was determined through interrogation of two enigma machine operators.
I started at Ga. Tech in ‘73 with a slide rule Then my parents gave me a kingly gift…All I had was a slide rule… - roadcat
I was very grateful
I can relate . . . nothing but a “sly drool” was available in the early ‘sixties.I decided to study to take the P.E. exam when the HP-35 was state of the art, and I used to borrow one from work to do the homework. One evening I forgot to borrow the calculator, and dug out my old slide rule and tried to . . . This is ridiculous!!! How did I ever figure out decimal points all those years in college???? I gave up trying and didn’t do the problems that nite.Even on an HP-35, doing coordinate transformation between rectangular and polar was painful.
Later on I bought an HP calculator which had complex arithmetic capability for, IIRC, $100. Didn’t really need it, but got my money’s worth in giggles just reading the manual . . .
Probably not. But I found it on one of those historical charts.
Not dissing your find at all, I just dont think even if someone had wanted that much, nobody could have made it for them if they took all year.
I recommend
- Code Girls:
- The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II
Turns out the the root of the NSA was a relative handful of men who were code experts, but the rank-and-file of the organization they built up was women. The advantages were the obvious fact that men who might have been recruited for it were freed up for other duty, but also the lack of respect accorded women in that era meant that their work was presumptively not serious. Which was a major advantage because the size of the organization they mounted to puzzle out the way to break codes would have aroused more curiosity if men were doing it - and arousing curiosity was the last thing they wanted.
It wasn’t just computers.
Of course. The chart was just an extrapolation.
(I spent much of my career at TI, working on ECL, the "High-speed, Watt-wasting Barn-burner" logic family... <GRIN>)
Coventry...
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