A couple of folks asked about Moore’s law on their exit tickets from Monday.

Tl;dr: Moore’s law is the conjecture made by Gordon Moore, based on observation of the early progress of integrated circuit production, that the upper limit in transistor density would double every year. This would lead to cheaper manufacture of more powerful computers, driving not just the market for high-end machines (such as those commissioned by the military and specialized research labs) but for consumer products (aka things average people could afford and use). It is NOT a scientific law. It’s kind of a nifty catchphrase that’s turned out to be more or less accurate. So far. But there’s speculation that we are going to reach the hard limit of transistor density as traditionally conceived, because things are getting pret-ty small in there, like nearing the width of an atom.

To go further:

Here’s a good overview.

Here’s something the Association for Computing Machinery had to say about it recently.

Here’s a critical technology studies reading of it by Paul Ceruzzi, which relates the general acceptance of this as a “law” to our tendency to adopt an outlook of technological determinism, or that our tools decide our future rather than they other way around.