In April 1965, the worldwide semiconductor industry had annual revenues of about $2 billion. It would be three more years before Gordon Moore, an electronics boffin, co-founded a company called Intel. Electronics Magazine, a publication that Mr Moore remembers as "one of the throw-away journals", asked him to opine on a trend or two. So he did. In prose that was passable for a numbers guy, Mr Moore imagined the possibility of "home computers" and "electronic watches". Oh, and he "blindly extrapolated" from progress he had noticed in the preceding years that the number of "components" (by which he meant transistors and resistors) on a silicon chip would probably keep doubling every year or so.
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