Moore's Law and Technological Determinism: Reflections on the History of Technology

摘要

Just over a year ago, the arrival in my mailbox of a book I had agreed to review triggered some thoughts about technology I had been meaning to articulate. The book was Ross Bassett's To the Digital Age: Research Labs, Start-up Companies, and the Rise of MOS Technology (Baltimore, 2002). In it, Bassett describes the development of metal-oxide semiconductor (MOS) technology, which enabled semiconductor firms to place more and more transistors on a single silicon chip. This became the basis for what is now known as Moore's law, after Gordon E. Moore. In April 1965, Moore, then the director of research and development at the semiconductor division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation, published a paper in which he observed that the number of transistors that could be placed on an integrated circuit had doubled every year since integrated circuits had been invented and predicted that that trend would continue. Shortly afterward, Moore left Fairchild to cofound Intel—a company, Bassett notes, that staked its future on MOS technology.