The Ever-Shrinking Transistor and the Invention of Google

Innovators are often unreasonable people: restless, quarrelsome, unsatisfied, and ambitious. Often, they are immigrants, especially on the west coast of America. Not always, though. Sometimes they can be quiet, unassuming, modest, and sensible stay-at-home types. The person whose career and insights best capture the extraordinary evolution of the computer between 1950 and 2000 was one such. Gordon Moore was at the centre of the industry throughout this period and he understood and explained better than most that it was an evolution, not a revolution. Apart from graduate school at Caltech and a couple of unhappy years out east, he barely left the Bay Area, let alone California. Unusually for a Californian, he was a native, who grew up in the small town of Pescadero on the Pacific coast just over the hills from what is now called Silicon Valley, going to San Jose State College for undergraduate studies. There he met and married a fellow student, Betty Whitaker. As a child, Moore had been taciturn to the point that his teachers worried about it. Throughout …

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