Moore’s Law is the observation that every two years, the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles.
In 1958, Jack Kilby created integrated circuits, which is an integration of transistors and relevant pieces of circuitry into one circuit (an integrated circuit). In the early 1960s, integrated circuits had only a few transistors, but by the late 1960s, each circuit had a few hundred transistors.
Enter Gordon Moore.
In 1965, Gordon Moore wrote an article for Electronics (a magazine) titled “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits“. In this article is the basis of “Moore’s Law”. He stated that the trend of circuit components becoming more powerful and cost-efficient would continue. He included a caveat too– because circuits will become more complex, the cost of creating a circuit will increase. However, but improved techniques will help mitigate that increase.
Moore predicted that in 1975 (ten years after the Electronics article was released) that integrated circuits would have about 65,000 components. His prediction turned out to be true! And we’ve been using Moore’s Law ever since.
So what does this mean for us?
Well, if we use an example that shows us the difference between the technology present in an iPhone 5S and an Apollo Guidance Computer (what they used to get people onto the moon), we can see some real discrepancies. Check out the complete specs comparison here!
The short version is that the processor speed of the iPhone is about 1300 times faster than the AGC, and has about 16,000,000 times the amount of memory! Just think of what we have to look forward to in 2025.
