Gordon Moore looks back, and forward, 40 years

Forty years after he coined the most famous law in computing, Gordon Moore still has a few words of advice for the industry.

For software developers: Simplify! Your interfaces are getting worse. Nanotechnology? Don't believe the hype; silicon chips are here to stay. Artificial intelligence? Try again, folks! You're barking up the wrong tree.

Speaking by telephone from Hawaii, where he now lives, Moore fielded an hour of questions from reporters Wednesday to mark the approaching 40th anniversary of his celebrated prediction -- that the number of transistors on integrated circuits would double roughly every two years.

Christened later as Moore's Law, his observation became something of a self-fulfilling prophecy for the industry, he said, driving computer makers to keep pace with the expected rate of advancement. But he was too humble to claim credit for a phenomenon that effectively made possible the rapid evolution of modern electronics.

"If I hadn't published this paper in '65, the trends would have been obvious a decade later anyway. I don't think a particular paper made a difference. I was just in a position where I could see the trend," he said.

Moore, now 76, was director of research and development at Fairchild Semiconductor when his paper was published in Electronics Magazine on April 19, 1965. Three years later he founded Intel with Robert Noyce, becoming its chief executive officer in 1975 and chairman four years after that.

His law had little effect at first, he said. The first big impact he recalls is when Japanese manufacturers entered the memory chip business in the 1970s. For a while, the Japanese struggled to find their step in a business where the technology seemed to advance in an unpredictable fashion.

"Once they saw the memory series developing -- from 1K, to 4K, to 16K -- they had a method by which to plan where the industry would end up, and they were very successful at intersecting the trajectory and taking a leading position," he said.

Moore reread his paper about a year ago, he said, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it also foresaw the use of computers at home, although he had forgotten he made that prediction by the time the first home computer appeared. In fact, as CEO of Intel years later, he would dismiss home computing altogether.

"An engineer came to me with an idea about a home computer," he recalled. "I said, 'Gee, that's fine but what would you use it for?' He could only think of a housewife using it to keep recipes on. I didn't think that would be a very powerful application, so I didn't think Intel should pursue a personal computer at that time."

In general, the computing industry has done "a pretty good job" over the years, he said. But he singled out software interfaces -- and by implication Microsoft, which has dominated PC software for decades -- for particular criticism. By cramming ever more features into applications, software makers may actually be moving backward, not forward, he said.

"As people make improvements in the interface, the complexity seems to grow, and I think if anything we're losing ground a bit in general purpose computing," Moore said. "They want to offer so many new functions in applications, it's difficult to simplify everything at the same time."