It's Moore's Law, but another had the idea first

One of the cornerstones of Silicon Valley will mark an anniversary Tuesday.

Forty years ago, Electronics magazine published Gordon E. Moore's celebrated article predicting that the number of transistors that could be placed on a silicon chip would continue to double at regular intervals for the foreseeable future.

Named Moore's Law several years later by the physicist Carver Mead, that simple observation has proven to be the bulwark of the world's most remarkable industry.

Yet Moore was not the only one--or even the first--to observe the so-called scaling effect that has led to the exponential acceleration of computing power that is now expected to continue at least for the next decade.

Before Moore's magazine article precisely plotted the increase in the number of transistors on a chip, beginning with 1, the computer scientist Douglas C. Engelbart had made a similar observation at the very dawn of the integrated-circuit era. Moore had heard Engelbart lecture on the subject, possibly in 1960.

Engelbart would later be hailed as the inventor of the computer mouse as well as the leading developer of many technologies that underlie both the personal computer industry and the Internet.

In a 2001 interview, Engelbart said that it was his thinking about the scaling down of circuits that gave him the confidence to move ahead with the design of an interactive computing system.

"I was relieved because it wasn't as crazy as everyone thought," he said.

Significantly, the two pioneers represent twin Silicon Valley cultures that have combined to create the digital economy.

Moore, who co-founded Intel, is an icon of the precise and perhaps narrower chip engineering discipline that today continues to progress by layering sheets of individual molecules, one on top of the other, and by making wires that are finer in diameter than a wavelength of light.

"Gordon was the classic engineer," said Craig Barrett, Intel's chief executive, who had just begun to teach engineering at Stanford University when Moore made his famous prediction.

The chart that accompanied his article was a plot that showed just five data points over seven years and extrapolated out into the future as far as 1975, when a single chip would be able to hold as many as 65,000 transistors. Forty years later, memory chip capacity has gone far beyond 1 billion of the tiny switches.

Augmenting the human mind
Engelbart, in contrast, was the architect of a passionately held view that computing could extend or "augment" the power of the human mind. His ideas were set out most clearly in 1968, in a famous demonstration in San Francisco of his Pentagon-financed Augment computing system. Many things were shown to the world for the first time, including the mouse, videoconferencing, interactive text editing, hypertext and networking--basically the outlines of modern Internet-style computing.

Engelbart had an epiphany in 1950, in which he imagined what would decades later become today's Internet-connected PC. He set about building it. At the time he had no idea of how he would