The tech visionary who wrote ‘Moore’s Law’

In 1965, Gordon Moore made a prediction: that integrated circuits would grow in complexity and capacity so fast that computer processing power would double every year. These advances would “lead to such wonders as home computers” and “personal portable communications equipment,” he wrote. While he later widened the time frame for doubling to every two years, his prediction of exponential advancement held up and became known as “Moore’s Law.” The law set forth an ethos of growth that made Silicon Valley the global leader of a tech revolution—and nobody did more to make Moore’s vision come true than Moore himself. He was the co-founder of Intel Corp., maker of the first commercial computer microprocessor. Intel’s Pentium silicon semiconductor chips eventually powered more than 80 percent of the world’s desktop computers. The most modest of tech billionaires, Moore was humble about his famous dictum. “I just did a wild extrapolation,” he said in 2015, “and it proved to be amazingly correct.”

Moore grew up in Pescadero, Calif., a farming community where his father was a county sheriff, said The Washington Post. The first person in his family to attend college, he earned a chemistry doctorate from the California Institute of Technology and was recruited by celebrated physicist William Shockley to work at his semiconductor lab near Stanford University. Shockley’s “overbearing management style” eventually led Moore and a few other engineers to start their own firm, Fairchild Semiconductor. That firm, said The Telegraph (U.K.), became “an incubator of much of the talent which gave rise to Silicon Valley.” In 1968, Moore and colleague Robert Noyce used $2.5 million in capital to found Integrated Electronics, later shortening the name to Intel.

They assembled a group of “the boldest and most creative technicians of the high-tech age,” said The New York Times. By the 1990s, Intel was “the most successful semiconductor company in history,” earning Moore, as chief executive from 1975 to 1987, a fortune of some $7 billion. In later years Moore “became a major figure in philanthropy,” but still maintained a preference for “tattered shirts and khakis” and shopping at Costco. He said he just had the good fortune to be “at the right place at the right time” to take part in the transformation of the industry. “It’s been a phenomenal ride,” he said.