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This stage, which may comprise 5 to 10 percent of the life cycle, finally yields to antiquity (examples today: the horse and buggy, the harpsichord, the manual typewriter, and the electromechanical calculator).
    To illustrate this, consider the phonograph record. In the mid-nineteenth century, there were several precursors, including Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville’s phonautograph, a device that recorded sound vibrations as a printed pattern. It was Thomas Edison, however, who in 1877 brought all of the elements together and invented the first device that could record and reproduce sound. Further refinements were necessary for the phonograph to become commercially viable. It became a fully mature technology in 1948 when Columbia introduced the 33 revolutions-per-minute (rpm) long-playing record (LP) and RCA Victor introduced the 45-rpm small disc. The pretender was the cassette tape, introduced in the 1960s and popularized during the 1970s. Early enthusiasts predicted that its small size and ability to be rerecorded would make the relatively bulky and scatchable record obsolete.
    Despite these obvious benefits, cassettes lack random access (the ability to play selections in a desired order) and are prone to their to their own forms of distortion and lack of fidelity. In the late 1980s and early 1990, the digital compact disc (CD) did deliver the mortal blow. With the CD providing both random access and a level of quality close to the limits of the human auditory system, the phonograph record entered the stage of obsolescence in the first half of the 1990s. Although still produced in small quantities, the technology that Edison gave birth to more than a century ago is now approaching antiquity.
    Another example is the print book, a rather mature technojbgy tpday. It is now in the stage of the pretenders, with the software-based “virtual” book as the pretender. Lacking the resolution, contrast, lack of flicker, and other visual qualities of paper and ink, the current generation of virtual book does not have the capability of displacing paper-based publications. Yet this victory of the paper-based book will be short-lived as future generations of computer displays succeed in providing a fully satisfactory alternative to paper.
 
     

The Emergence of Moore’s Law
     
    Gordon Moore, an inventor of the integrated circuit and then chairman of Intel, noted in 1965 that the surface area of a transistor (as etched on an integrated circuit) was being reduced by approximately 50 percent every twelve months. In 1975, he was widely reported to have revised this observation to eighteen months. Moore claims that his 1975 update was to twenty-four months, and that does appear to be a better fit to the data.
    MOORE’S LAW AT WORK

    The result is that every two years, you can pack twice as many transistors on an integrated circuit. This doubles both the number of components on a chip as well as its speed. Since the cost of an integrated circuit is fairly constant, the implication is that every two years you can get twice as much circuitry running at twice the speed for the same price. For many applications, that’s an effective quadrupling of the value. The observation holds true for every type of circuit, from memory chips to computer processors.
    This insightful observation has become known as Moore’s Law on Integrated Circuits, and the remarkable phenomenon of the law has been driving the acceleration of computing for the past forty years. But how much longer can this go on? The chip companies have expressed confidence in another fifteen to twenty years of Moore’s Law by continuing their practice of using increasingly higher resolutions of optical lithography (an electronic process similar to photographic printing) to reduce the feature size—measured today in millionths of a meter—of transistors and other key components. 18 But then—after almost sixty years—this paradigm will break down. The transistor insulators