Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley pioneer who co-founded Intel, dies at 94

Without him, no Apple or IBM PC.

A 386 Pentium chip he gave me. It is a pin. I am pretty sure where it is and I will try to photograph it tomorrow and post it.

Moore was the first to observe that the number of transistors on integrated circuit chips doubles about every two years, and that rate should be expected to continue -- up to some unknown limit. "Moore's Law" is still somewhat accurate, but physical limits are in sight. Even if some of those can be overcome, around 2036 the law will bump into the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the transistors won't be reliable.

If you keep doubling, every ten doublings is a factor of 1,000. Every 40 doublings is a factor of a trillion. There are only so many atoms you can put on a computer chip.

He was the keynote speaker. His big prediction in that speech was that people like me, systems programmers for mainframe computers, what the kids started calling "big iron" would see our jobs go away in the not too distant future. He was kind of right. I'm retired now. I think big mainframe computers still exist and somebody keeps them running. But mostly people use "little" computers. I call them little, because they don't weigh a ton anymore, though the desktop I'm working with right now has way more power and 1,000 times the storage capacity of the first mainframes I worked with.

Yes, yes, I'm old now, old enough to remember punch cards and paper tape. That was in the 1970s, after the moon landings. When i met Gordon Moore in the 1990s, the World Wide Web was a new thing. No Google, no Amazon, no Wikipedia. How did people survive in such a primitive world? (Oops. I double-checked and Amazon may have existed, but only sold books.)

The NWS still uses them to run the weather models and have been in the process of upgrading the hardware and software over the past 5 years - https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/noaa-upgrades-flagship-us-global-weather-model

The American models (e.g., GFS and NAM) are usually run 4 times per day and the globals include ensemble runs (which are probably what are the most intensive).

My dad worked as a "computer programmer" (as the federal government PD titled them) writing COBOL programs for the Veteran's Administration (now Dept of Veteran's Affairs). He had been trained by "the Admiral" (as she was fondly and correctly called) Grace Hopper back in the '50s and worked there for 20 years before he passed in the mid-'70s. As kids, he would bring me and my sisters in to see the mainframe his team programmed for that took up a whole floor of the building. I believe that was one of the sites that issued Veterans' benefit checks at the time.

I remember the banks of mag tape units and of course, the loud card readers. He and his buddies had stacks of punch cards that had been punched specifically to generate certain tones out of the pins of the reader to "play" a song like "Jingle Bells", etc.

He used to bring write-protect tabs home that we would throw around like frisbees.