Security News > 2020 > September > Contractor convicted of pinching supercomputer cycles to mine cryptocurrency
In 1965, Gordon Moore published a short informal paper, Cramming more components onto integrated circuits.
Based on not much more but these few data points and his knowledge of silicon chip development - he was head of R&D at Fairchild Semiconductors, the company that was to seed Silicon Valley - he said that for the next decade, component counts by area could double every year.
By 1975, as far as he would look, up to 65,000 components such as transistors could fit on a single chip costing no more than the 100-component chips at the time of publishing.
In 1975, eight years after leaving Fairchild to co-found Intel, Moore revised his "Law", actually just an observation, to a doubling every two years.
The chip industry had the perfect metric to aim for a rolling, virtuous milestone like no other.