Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

Moore or Less

In 1965, Gordon Moore wrote an article called Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits. Sometimes, the title of an article sort of writes itself.

Moore was the Director for Research and Development at Fairchild Semiconductor, which was a truly pivotal company in the history of computing and in the birth of Silicon Valley. It had been founded by the so-called “Traitorous Eight”—scientists and engineers who had left Shockley Semiconductor due to William Shockley’s authoritarian and abrasive style of management.

Shockley himself had been one of the inventors of the transistor while working at Bell Labs, and people were in awe of his accomplishments. A Nobel Prize in 1956 pushed Shockley’s already legendary status over the top, and as a result, Shockley had little trouble recruiting brilliant minds, including Moore and the rest of the Traitorous Eight. Unfortunately, he drove them away within just a couple of years.

When Moore penned his piece (here’s the original article), Fairc…