Book: Moore’s Law

Moore’s Law: The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley’s Quiet Revolutionary by Arnold Thackray, David Brock and Rachel Jones.

Gordon Moore once said my name. I’ve always been pretty stoked about that. Mostly because he was at the center of one of the greatest technological revolutions that humanity has seen: the rise of the silicon microprocessor. This book is a detailed biography, including lots of back story on Moore’s family. Moore’s personal life and even his personality was, in some ways, not too remarkable. This is not a book full of amusing stories, but instead focuses on the long pull of Moore’s life work. I came away from it with a greater appreciation of how complicated the story of the integrated circuit really was. We forget how long and how many challenges were overcome over the many decades of the rise of Moore’s law. Seeing how these were attacked was illuminating. The attack was generally first by putting on the scientist hat to try to understand, and then pivoting to engineering to see how to fix it, but often was a messy mix of the two, with an amazing amount of prior “expertise” necessary to make progress.

Recommended for nerds of the history of computing.

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