From today's perspective, it seems clear that Gordon Moore got lucky. Back in 1965, Electronics magazine asked Moore-then research director of electronics pioneer Fairchild Semiconductor-to predict the future of the microchip industry. At the time, the industry was in its infancy; Intel, now the world's biggest chip-maker, would not be founded (by Moore, among others) for another three years. Because few chips had been manufactured and sold, Moore had little data to go on. Nonetheless, he confidently argued that engineers would be able to cram an ever-increasing number of electronic devices onto microchips. Indeed, he guessed that the number would roughly double every year-an exponential increase that has come to be known as Moore's Law.

At first, few paid attention to Moore's prediction. Moore himself admitted that he didn't place much stock in it-he had been "just trying to get across the idea [that] this was a technology that had a future." But events proved him right. In 1965, when Moore wrote his article, the world's most complex chip was right in his lab at Fairchild: It had 64 transistors. Intel's new-model Pentium III, introduced last October, contains 28 million transistors. "The sustained explosion of microchip complexity-doubling year after year, decade after decade," Lillian Hoddeson and Michael Riordan write in Crystal Fire, their history of the transistor, "has no convenient parallel or analogue in normal human experience."