Gordon Moore wasn’t overly enthused when he was asked to write an article to celebrate the 35th anniversary of Electronic Magazine in 1965. "I was given the chore of predicting what would happen in silicon components in the next ten years," he recalled 40 years later. But as Director of R&D at Fairfield Semiconductor, which had developed the breakthrough planar transistor in 1959, he was perfectly placed to assess the progress that had been made in six short years.
In particular, Moore noticed that Fairfield had doubled the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip each year — being able to squeeze 60 where there had once been two. He then "blindly extrapolated for about ten years and said, okay, in 1975 we’ll have about 60 thousand components on a chip." In other words, every year the number had doubled and Moore thought it would continue to double. His prediction was neat and easy to understand — but most of all, it worked.
