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Intel The Almighty Buck The Media IT

Intel Seeking Moore's Law Original Publication 257

Posted by timothy from the mislaid-claims dept.
ackthpt writes "Gordon Moore's famous prediction, labeled Moore's Law, was originally published in the April 19, 1965 issued of Electronics. Sometime since, he lent out his copy and it has never been returned. Intel would like an original copy of the now defunct magazine and is offering $10,000 for a copy, presumably in good condition. The story is carried on Reuters, and if you happen to have a copy (of your own, not stolen from a museum or library) you may contact Intel via eBay's WantItNow."
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Intel Seeking Moore's Law Original Publication More

Intel Seeking Moore's Law Original Publication

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  • Be fast (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @06:20PM (#12218174) Homepage
    Better get them a copy quickly - in a year and a half, the reward goes down to 5,000$, then 2,500$ another year and a half later....
    • i'd think it'd go in the opposite direction in accordance to Moore's law. the longer you keep it, the more worth it has (as with most of these antique type of things).

      so now it's $10,000. next year it'll be $20,000, then $40,000 and so on.

      • actually... (Score:4, Informative)

        by 0x20 ( 546659 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @10:15PM (#12220088) Homepage
        In the 1960s, most large computers were used on a timeshare basis. In many instances, if you wanted calculations done, you bought blocks of "computer time" by the minute. Thus, twice the computing power would = half the cost. Therefore something that cost $10000 one year should only cost $5000 the next year (when the computer was twice as fast), etc.

  • Well... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Sottilde ( 836088 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @06:20PM (#12218180)
    That's the last time I use old science magazines to start a fire...

  • You can have my copy... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Cylix ( 55374 ) * on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @06:20PM (#12218181) Homepage Journal
    When you pry it from my cold dead hands.

  • oops (Score:2, Funny)

    by sfcat ( 872532 )
    He didn't keep a copy. I guess he used a typewriter, it was written in 1965 after all.
    • "I guess he used a typewriter, it was written in 1965 after all."

      I'm sure he has it somewhere. I read on a right-wing blog that all the fonts appearing in the article were proportional TrueType fonts which were first used in Microsoft Office very recently.

    • Re:oops (Score:3, Funny)

      by JVert ( 578547 )
      I once wrote an article, showed it to a magazine and they said it was good but I have rewrite it if they were going to print it.

      Fuck that, i'll just use a copy machine.

  • Count me in, but... (Score:5, Funny)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @06:21PM (#12218186)
    Count me in, if you make it worth my while: Double the prize every 18 months.

  • Unfourtunately (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @06:21PM (#12218192)
    Thanks to his evil brother's law (Murphy), everything that could go wrong has, and there are no copies left in existence...

    • Re:Unfourtunately (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @06:35PM (#12218321)
      This is actually an evil plot. Intel has secretly laid plans to purchase every copy of this magazine known to be in existance. Years from now, when Moore's Law breaks down, critics everywhere will proclaim "Moore was a moron! He didn't know at all what he was talking about."

      And Intel, being the snide company, will simply ask: "And what law would you be referring to? Provide us with evidence, please."

      Only no evidence will exist, besides that which is safely locked away in the Intel safe.

      Evil, I say... plain 'ol evil.

      • Re:Unfourtunately (Score:3, Insightful)

        by MindStalker ( 22827 )
        There are several photocopies and digital copies that are floating around (even someoen ebaying a PDF version for 50 bucks, and he has bidders..??) So all evidence won't be completly destroyed.

        • Re:Unfourtunately (Score:3, Insightful)

          by jallen02 ( 124384 )
          This is a concept I am going to try and explain in simple and eloquent terms that even the most humorless slashdotter can understand. I know, being a crowd of logically minded folk the responses tend to be well thought out and analyzed from every angle to ensure that nothing but the highest quality ideas and posts make it to this site. With that in mind, I do believe the original poster was attempting this odd thing known as 'humor' This is an act where one makes a statement that is very outlandish and sill
        • Nah. We will just claim that some of Moore's friends who outlived him cooked up this scheme to make him look good. PDFs can be easily faked after all.

          In fact a few generations after Moore is dead, a group of people will say the Moore never existed.

          "Simply a group of folks with too much time on their hands concoted the whole thing. You see, the geeks needed a leader to rally around. So they invented Moore (and that Linus guy too... archeolgical digs found he was really a fictional cartoon character created
    • Thanks to his evil brother's law (Murphy), everything that could go wrong has, and there are no copies left in existence...

      Meanwhile, his cousin, Godwin, left to join the Nazis.
    • Thanks to his evil brother's law (Murphy), everything that could go wrong has, and there are no copies left in existence...

      They combined forces and created a new set of laws:

      1. Shit happens

      2. Shit doubles every 18 months

      3. Can't stop shit

  • Who borrowed it? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by modemboy ( 233342 )
    I wonder if whoever borrowed the copy Moore had knows that they have it? Has he tried calling his friends? ;)
  • That a technology company would find its money better spent upon building the future than enshrining the most important things of its past.

    But then, I'm bitter, Intel rejected me for a job long ago.

  • I got Gordon's copy (Score:4, Funny)

    by xbytor ( 215790 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @06:33PM (#12218303) Homepage
    But the price just doubled.

  • it's just words - they want to be free! (Score:5, Funny)

    by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @06:34PM (#12218306)
    of your own, not stolen from a museum or library

    I believe the local vernacular is "shared."
    • "I believe the local vernacular is "shared."" In the local vernacular, the term "shared" is used a lot for file sharing. It is technically, legally, and morally impossible to steal when participating in file sharing, as files end up duplicated and nothing is taken, let alone stolen

      If someone had "shared" Intel's magazine, Intel would still have it, and the other person would be in possession of a perfect copy of the one that Intel had. This is not what happened here.

  • Bargain ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by shashark ( 836922 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @06:36PM (#12218329)
    When ordinary memorabilia auctions (baseballs [americanmemorabilia.com] fetching more than $10k) at much more, $10k would be a pretty small sum to pay for this original copy.

    If it's a unique copy, this could be worth much more. And the price will rise as the time progresses.
    --
    All your magazines are belong to us.

  • Warning - Buyer Feedback score of zero (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @06:37PM (#12218348)
    Is it safe to do business with Intel on Ebay ?

  • eBay feedback (Score:5, Funny)

    by tuxedobob ( 582913 ) * <tuxedobob AT mac DOT com> on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @06:38PM (#12218350)
    They've got a feedback score of 0. I'm not so sure I'd want to sell to them...
    • They've got a feedback score of 0. I'm not so sure I'd want to sell to them...

      Hmmm. I get a score of 0.00023829376 on my Wintel machine.

  • Oh no... (Score:3, Funny)

    by jjthe2 ( 684242 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @06:40PM (#12218381)
    My mom threw out my shoebox filled with old electrical engineering journals last year. And I'm positive I a had a mint-condition copy of the '65 Electronics.
  • The price of a missing document doubles every two years, until it exceeds the cost of a new car.

    Sadly, the price of a new car goes up by n factorial every year ... and it's mileage decreases by the square of its tonnage (in metric tons).

    All figures are in Euros, of course, since the price of a Dollar decreases to n/(n+x) where n is the number of years GWB is in office and x is the trade deficit in trillions of Euros.

  • It's not a law! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Jon_Hanson ( 779123 ) <jon@the-hansons-az.net> on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @06:57PM (#12218536)

    I wish people would stop calling Moore's Law a law. Laws don't have the word "about" in them ("transistor counts double about every 18 months"). It should be called "Moore's Observation" or "Moore's Conjecture."

    In physics, do we say that force is about equal to mass times acceleration?

    • I wish people would stop calling Moore's Law a law. Laws don't have the word "about" in them ("transistor counts double about every 18 months"). It should be called "Moore's Observation" or "Moore's Conjecture."

      But in economics or biology, Laws are that ambiguous.

      Sometimes, for people like you, we call them Rules, as in the Rule of Three (for biological proteins), but they're also called Laws (as in the Law of Small Numbers).

      It depends on what your definition of the word Law is.
    • Actually, I believe in physics people say that force is proportional to the product of mass and acceleration. IIRC from physics classes, Newton's Second Law (actually invented by Descartes, incidently) is expressed not only as a proportion, but as a second-order differential.

      Moore's Law is a perfectly valid law. You don't get absolutes in any kind of empirical study. What you get is a scatter-plot, which you can draw some line or curve through. In this case, Moore's Law is that the theoretical line has a

    • In physics, do we say that force is about equal to mass times acceleration?

      Perhaps you should [physicstoday.org].
    • Well yes actually. F = ma doesn't apply for relativistic speeds. Also, as Wikipedia [wikipedia.org] puts it, not all fields hold the word to the same standard.

    • Re:It's not a law! (Score:3, Informative)

      by Sanga ( 125777 )
      >> In physics, do we say that force is about equal to mass times acceleration?

      Heisenberg said so. He said that about velocity -- velocity is even easier to calculate than accelaration.

    • Re:It's not a law! (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well, then I guess we should get rid of the ideal gas law (not applicable to real gases), Fourier's law of heat conduction (thermal conductivities are not really constant), Newton's law of cooling (at best a rough approximation), Fick's law of diffusion, Newton's laws of motion (not accurate at relativistic velocities), etc. So called "laws" of physics are all really just approximations, usually based purely on observation, before the underlying mechanisms were discovered. I doubt you could name one physi

  • Sorry Gordon (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I know I said I'd return it back in '66. I just wanted to read that article on wiring. I swear I'll return it soon, but there's this other article that I want to read first...

  • Sometime since, he lent out his copy and it has never been returned. Intel would like an original copy of the now defunct magazine and is offering $10,000 for a copy...

    And they say that crime does not pay... ;-)

  • AMD vs Intel (Score:4, Funny)

    by jwymanm ( 627857 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @07:01PM (#12218571) Homepage
    It'd be funny to see if someone did post an auction for the magazine and AMD and Intel got in a bidding war. Possibly even funnier if IBM came along and took it right out from under both of them.
  • Am I the only person who has noticed that while computers claim to get faster, software seems to get slower?

    I recall seeing amazing programs running in 16k of RAM on a 2Mhz Z80. What happened to the brilliant software designers of that era? They're sure not working on today's platforms.

    I tend to believe that the drive for more memory and faster CPUs is primarily the result of the decline of quality software development. Moore's law is only of interest as long as the current crop of developers use hardw
    • I suspect you're remembering stuff running on TRS-80s or Apple IIs.

      Why is software slower today? Well, it does a lot more. For example, think about how many pixels things move around today. My first computer, a TRS-80, had a monochrome screen resolution of 128x48 (today my phone has a 320x320 screen that shows 64k colors).

      In the old days, if you wrote a game, you did it in hand-opimized assembler for a simple processor. (today, compilers will, in general, out-optimize a human being, because processors are
    • What happened to the brilliant software designers of that era?

      They're busy reading slashdot?

      ---
      I type this every time.
    • I recall seeing amazing programs running in 16k of RAM on a 2Mhz Z80. What happened to the brilliant software designers of that era? They're sure not working on today's platforms.

      Software is designed to do a lot more these days. Team sizes have gone up significantly. Unfortunately, when you have 10 or 100 (or 1000) people working on a piece of software, it can't be made as "tight" as one person trying to squeeze it all onto a machine with 16k of ram. The interface artist wants to include transition ani

    • They're still there... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )
      I recall seeing amazing programs running in 16k of RAM on a 2Mhz Z80. What happened to the brilliant software designers of that era? They're sure not working on today's platforms. ...embedded platforms, and the system/toolkit libraries we all love and use. Some of that stuff is still assembly optimized. As for RAM, in games graphics, music and game state take far more than any "code" does. In business apps, the data sets do. Nobody cares if you're using 16kB or 1600KB if you're working on 10000kB of data.

      A

  • "Moore's Law" a Misnomer (Score:5, Informative)

    by rinkjustice ( 24156 ) <rinkjustice&NO_SPAMrocketmail,com> on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @08:00PM (#12219060) Homepage Journal
    Some interesting facts I gleened from an article written by Tom R. Halfhill, an analyst for Microprocessor Report [halfhill.com].

    Fact #1: More's Law is not a scientific law, but and only an observation describing semiconductors pace of progress.

    Fact #2: Intel cofounder Dr.Gordon E. Moore did not define Moore's law as it is understood today. He didn't even call it a "law" in the original article. Somebody else much later coined the now famous term.

    Fact #3: Moore's law was never about processor clock frequency or other performance issues. Rather, it regards the economic manufacturing of component integration on integrated circuits.

    Fact #4: Moore's law actually stated component integration doubles every 12 months - not 18 - and he actually ammended this prediction to 24 months. 18 months is a number seemingly drawn from a hat.

    Fact #5: Moore's law is extremely inaccurate. Tom Halfhill estimates todays chips would have more than 27 trillion transistors, when in reality Intel's Prescott Pentium sports 169 million transistors.
  • Intel would like an original copy of the now defunct magazine and is offering $10,000 for a copy...

    I bet Max Ary [slashdot.org] has one!

    ...of your own, not stolen from a museum or library.

    d'OH. Sorry, didn't read the additional clauses yet...

  • Let's think this through... (Score:5, Funny)

    by RobertKozak ( 613503 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @08:10PM (#12219159) Homepage

    Let's say that I did have a copy of this magazine. I would expect to be paid for it based on Moore's Law. Its only fitting. So with that in mind, let's see how much it woiuld be:

    Magazine came out 40 years ago. Moore's Law says it doubles every 18 months. That's 26.6 doublings. Let's take 26 to make it easy. So thats 2^26 of the price.

    I could not find what the cover price was but let's be fair and say $0.10 (10 cents). So thats 2^26 * 10 / 100 = $6,710,886.40. Thats a good deal more than the $10,000.00 they are offering.

    I think its a rip-off.

    BTW: here is a link to the original article [intel.com] in PDF format.

  • Since Pentium, it is actually 17.99972813 months (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @09:08PM (#12219590)
    nuf sed

  • Disclaimer (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Frankie70 ( 803801 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @09:26PM (#12219720)
    This is in the disclaimers section
    Intel employees & their families ineligible.

    Why? Why won't they buy from Intel employees?
    Or is that all Intel employees have to pledge their first borns & magazine collections when they join the company?

  • And to think... (Score:3, Funny)

    by slapout ( 93640 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @09:31PM (#12219759)
    ...my girlfriend wants me to throw out my old computer magazines. I got to show her this. :-)

  • Wonder Why... (Score:4, Funny)

    by djinn2020 ( 874365 ) on Tuesday April 12, 2005 @10:35PM (#12220226) Journal
    Why would Intel want a copy of this law? New ad campaign?

    Moore stated that computing power would double every 18 months... his estimations were a tad slow -- introducing the new P6!!! released just 5 months after the P5 and over twice as fast *at over 4 times the cost*

    Buy it now at Dell.com!

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