Moore is famous for the law that bears his name: namely, that the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto a microchip doubles every 2 years. The “law” originated from Moore’s insatiable love of data, his tendency to take copious notes, his reflective, analytical thinking and his affinity for graphs. Moore made this prediction in 1975 and although it is now generally held to have expired, it held true for 30 years, a testament to Moore’s vision for the field. He predicted “portable communications devices” – phones and so forth.
Moore himself seems to have been a staid bit of dullard about everything except work. He led a rather exemplary sort of life
Moore couldn’t have been completely boring though: he was one of the “Treacherous Eight” engineers who deserted Shockley Semiconductor to found Fairchild Semiconductor and then Intel, still the world’s premier transistor/microchip corporation. Moore was hand-picked by Shockley himself, the “godfather of the transistor”.
Shockley’s story is an interesting digression in the book: Shockley fled the storied Bell Labs to found Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View, California In what may be the first Silicon Valley venture capital investment, Shockley secured the funds from Arnold Beckman, whose name is prominent on every other building at Caltech and who had made a fortune in high-precision instrumentation. And why Mountain View? Google did not exist yet. However, Shockley’s mother lived in Palo Alto.
Shockley Semiconductor is a fine example of why academic spinouts are often such a failure. It turns out that brilliant scientists are often rubbish managers with titanic egos.
Shockley got the Nobel Prize, but Moore got Intel and a vast mega-fortune that was rather ill-suited to his modest and humble lifestyle. More and his wife gave billions and billions away.
Moore’s family life reads like a 1950s stereotype and I cannot believe it is the whole truth. Moore’s name, like Beckman’s, is plastered all over Caltech. Moore created the blueprint for modern tech titan philanthropy: he and his wife Betty, who observes wryly throughout the book that her husband and his father never show emotion, gave hundreds of millions to charity.
On that note, I did enjoy the story of how Moore disliked Bill Gates.