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Intel Seeking Moore's Law Original Publication
ackthpt writes "Gordon Moore's famous prediction, labeled Moore's Law, was originally published in the April 19, 1965 issued of Electronics. Sometime since, he lent out his copy and it has never been returned. Intel would like an original copy of the now defunct magazine and is offering $10,000 for a copy, presumably in good condition. The story is carried on Reuters, and if you happen to have a copy (of your own, not stolen from a museum or library) you may contact Intel via eBay's WantItNow."
Repeat after me:
Moore's Law has nothing to do with clockspeed.
Maybe get that tatooed somewhere.
It's a Digital Reproduction, PDF. Fooey on that!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
From the auction description:
This auction is for a digital copy of the above magazine article, including the issue cover and credits page. This is a MINT CONDITION copy because it has been fully restored digitally and available in Adobe PDF format. All raster graphics have been restored and saved at 300 dpi for quality reproduction.
In other words, the person is selling a copyright violation. Methinks eBay would love to know about that.
p
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I wish people would stop calling Moore's Law a law. Laws don't have the word "about" in them ("transistor counts double about every 18 months"). It should be called "Moore's Observation" or "Moore's Conjecture."
But in economics or biology, Laws are that ambiguous.
Sometimes, for people like you, we call them Rules, as in the Rule of Three (for biological proteins), but they're also called Laws (as in the Law of Small Numbers).
It depends on what your definition of the word Law is.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
>> In physics, do we say that force is about equal to mass times acceleration?
Heisenberg said so. He said that about velocity -- velocity is even easier to calculate than accelaration.
Some interesting facts I gleened from an article written by Tom R. Halfhill, an analyst for Microprocessor Report.
Fact #1: More's Law is not a scientific law, but and only an observation describing semiconductors pace of progress.
Fact #2: Intel cofounder Dr.Gordon E. Moore did not define Moore's law as it is understood today. He didn't even call it a "law" in the original article. Somebody else much later coined the now famous term.
Fact #3: Moore's law was never about processor clock frequency or other performance issues. Rather, it regards the economic manufacturing of component integration on integrated circuits.
Fact #4: Moore's law actually stated component integration doubles every 12 months - not 18 - and he actually ammended this prediction to 24 months. 18 months is a number seemingly drawn from a hat.
Fact #5: Moore's law is extremely inaccurate. Tom Halfhill estimates todays chips would have more than 27 trillion transistors, when in reality Intel's Prescott Pentium sports 169 million transistors.
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Well, then I guess we should get rid of the ideal gas law (not applicable to real gases), Fourier's law of heat conduction (thermal conductivities are not really constant), Newton's law of cooling (at best a rough approximation), Fick's law of diffusion, Newton's laws of motion (not accurate at relativistic velocities), etc. So called "laws" of physics are all really just approximations, usually based purely on observation, before the underlying mechanisms were discovered. I doubt you could name one physical law that is completely accurate.
One thing that makes Moore's law different, though is that while we expect Newton's laws to be just as accurate 100 years from now, most people wouldn't venture to guess the same of Moore's law. On the other hand, it has shown to be relatively accurate throughout the last few decades, which is saying quite a lot about such a rapidly developing technology.
In the 1960s, most large computers were used on a timeshare basis. In many instances, if you wanted calculations done, you bought blocks of "computer time" by the minute. Thus, twice the computing power would = half the cost. Therefore something that cost $10000 one year should only cost $5000 the next year (when the computer was twice as fast), etc.
The funny thing is that I'd be midly angry if it were any other post you copied, but Singularity awareness must increase by any means...
Power to the Peaceful