On Feb 8, 2008, at 11:36 PM, Apptech wrote:

>> Besides, isn't 1965 to 1985 when most of the interesting things  
>> happened in electronics and computers?  Not so much the fruits of  
>> Moore's law, but all the stuff that made it possible...
>
> IMHOFWIW, Moore's law has no fruits - it's just an empirical  
> comment on the way that fruit trees appear to grow.

What I meant was that I thought the advances in electronics and  
computer science from 1965 to 1985 were more qualitatively  
significant than the advances since 1985, which have more along the  
lines of following the geometry curve to "cheaper, faster, and more  
powerful."
Now, I'm not all that sure of that opinion; it seems to me that if  
you look closely at the enabling technology that allowed Moore's law  
to proceed, there's quite a lot of "real developments" that did in  
fact occur.  Perhaps the advances that allow a gigaflop computer to  
be purchased by Joe Consumer at Sears ARE as qualitatively important  
as the ones that allowed Cray to build a Gigaflop computer only  
governments and very large corporations could afford.

BillW

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