Moore's Law at 50

Yeah, it's been a heckuva ride!

I would like to see a chart of Moore's Law next to a chart of Windows showing how Windows eats up all that power in step with it coming about. This means that our computers are no faster now than they were in the 1980's when the operating system was in machine code. This is just how I see the world we live in.

Welcome.

I think your comparison is a bit extreme, but I hear you on how processors have to get faster just to accomodate the bling.

Imagine running this forum in machine code directly. I'm pretty happy to have a pretty display and simplicity and all the hard and boring bits done by the computer.

But the bling makes the machines pay so there you have it.

Enjoy CR4.

I was reading the article and I had to do a double take. "Moore subsequently went on to co-found Intel along with Fairchild's co-founder Robert Noyce in 1986, and was followed there by several other Fairchild co-founders. He served as chairman from 1979 to 1997 when he was given emeritus status."

I was in college in 1986 and I know that's not when Intel was founded. I did a Google search and they transposed the numbers - Intel was founded in 1968! That's better.

I've corrected the article to reflect 1968 and not 1986. Thank you for pointing out the error!

David

I will admit that back in the late 1990's, I didn't think that continuing Moore's Law was possible. Boy, was I wrong! I actually thought we had hit a physical barrier and the shift would be away from microprocessor speed/complexity and to higher communications speed via fiber optics. We know that both have happened simultaneously.

As I sit back and thing about my PC back in 1999, I must say that I thought it was a pretty powerful machine. Today, that machine isn't even a good paperweight! I can now hold a more powerful computer in my hand (cell phone) and the cost is only a few hundred dollars. The speed we're moving forward is astonishing!

Back in college, I took a course on assembly language and machine code. I thoroughly enjoyed it, because it showed me how the software interacted with the hardware (CPU, registers, keyboard, etc).

I don't think they teach this in college anymore, though I could be wrong.

Back in the late 1990's, my daughter's boyfriend, who was into the internet, was trying to show me the new way of coding software. Instead of going through a structured process, he told me that he just goes to other people's websites and takes things that he thinks will look good on his site. Then he modifies them as he needs to - most of it hit and miss. For instance, he sees the word "This is for a 4 cylinder Ford Probe" and he changes it to "This is for a 6 cylinder Ford Probe". He's not sure it's going to look right, until he runs the program.

I was shocked to hear his take on software programming. When I asked him why he doesn't start with a module and modify it as he needs to, his response was that it would take too long and it's easier for him to take stuff from other sites and modify them as needed.

I sure hope that other web developers don't do this sort of stuff, but I feel it's a lot more prevalent than we think.

It's like designing something around the junk that's lying around in the shed V designing something and crafting specific material to an exact requirement.

New age scrap assembly....