Moore's Law

The Life of Gordon Moore, Silicon Valley's Quiet Revolutionary

By: Arnold Thackray, David Brock, Rachel Jones

Narrated by: Don Hagen

Length: 24 hrs and 27 mins

Publisher's summary

Our world today - from the phone in your pocket to the car that you drive, the allure of social media to the strategy of the Pentagon - has been shaped irrevocably by the technology of silicon transistors. Year after year, for half a century, these tiny switches have enabled ever-more startling capabilities. Their incredible proliferation has altered the course of human history as dramatically as any political or social revolution. At the heart of it all has been one quiet Californian: Gordon Moore.

At Fairchild Semiconductor, his seminal Silicon Valley startup, Moore - a young chemist turned electronics entrepreneur - had the defining insight: silicon transistors, and microchips made of them, could make electronics profoundly cheap and immensely powerful. Microchips could double in power, then redouble again in clockwork fashion. History has borne out this insight, which we now call "Moore's Law", and Moore himself, having recognized it, worked endlessly to realize his vision. With Moore's technological leadership at Fairchild and then at his second start-up, the Intel Corporation, the law has held for 50 years. The result is profound: from the days of enormous, clunky computers of limited capability to our new era, in which computers are placed everywhere from inside of our bodies to the surface of Mars. Moore led nothing short of a revolution.

In Moore's Law, Arnold Thackray, David C. Brock, and Rachel Jones give the authoritative account of Gordon Moore's life and his role in the development both of Silicon Valley and the transformative technologies developed there. Told by a team of writers with unparalleled access to Moore, his family, and his contemporaries, this is the human story of man and a career that have had almost superhuman effects. The history of 20th-century technology is littered with overblown "revolutions". Moore's Law is essential listening for anyone seeking to learn what a real revolution looks like.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying reference material will be available in your My Library section along with the audio.

©2015 Arnold Thackray, David Brock, Rachel Jones (P)2015 Gildan Media LLC

Moore’s Role in the silicon revolution come alive

This right’s the wrong done to Gordon by world in allowing the brightness of Moore’s Law to white out his many other accomplishments. For years I’ve heard from Intel insiders that Gordon was the real force behind Intel’s rise. The media attention given to the careers of Robert Noyce and Andy Grove and the brightness of their personalities has also serve to white out this humble man, shadowing his accomplishments in fantasy histories of how the the company was build. This book rights this wrong, bringing Gordon into the light for the first time.

a great and untold story

Moore gets comparatively little lip service and it allows the world if technology to overlook the role of determination and consistency, along with chemistry in the history of computers. Those seem like unsexy concepts in the world of innovation and quantum computing, but the fundamentals and commitment to social-consensus that Moore's law was fueled by is well-highlighted here.

dry but worthwhile.

Gordon Moore, the transistor, and microprocessor

bio of Gordon Moore and the history of the transistor and microprocessor all in one

Interesting back story

As the audio book concludes, the life of Gordon Moore has been something of an era. We have gotten used to the exponential growth of microprocessor power, and it has been the invisible driver of the digital revolution. Though the improvements may soon be slowing down, just as Moore himself is. How great to know this history.
I tried to explain the appeal of this book to my friends. They started checking their watches, and we had a laugh about my boring nerdy listening habits. Hey, it's not going to be the book for everyone. Moore isn't exactly a swashbuckling Jobs character, though part of the appeal of his character lies in the contrast of his quiet, methodical conservatism to the tech characters we're more likely to hear about.
But if the topic grabs you, I think the book does it justice.

Solid coverage on the life of Gordon Moore

This audio book is quite lengthy. it is unfortunate that the authors include a lot of repetition. The book does justice to describing the life of Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel.

However, the beginning of the book goes into excruciating detail regarding the ancestors of Gordon and his wife Betty. Instead of beginning the story with their childhood, or even their parents, the story goes back generations to early family settlers in California. The story also provides equally the same in-depth description about Gordon's philanthropy.

This is all great, but in my opinion (if that really matters) this book could have been condensed with regard to those two topics and could have reduced the recording to under 20 hours from the 24.5 hours it is. so if you love details, this is the book for you.

The book reminds me of two steps forward and one step back, in terms of its progress of telling the story on a timeline.

The details of how Gordon Moore, along with other Silicon Valley giants, weaved together the business empire of Intel. A great success story of American business at its finest.

Don Hagen does a good job of narrating this book. His voice is deep, clear concise and very soothing.

I have given this book a good rating, knowing how much research and care went into telling this very important story of a person who is really an icon in the electronics industry and a person who's hard work and dedication has enabled all of us to enjoy the use of our electronic gadgets, like this smartphone I am using to write this review.

Gordon Moore is rich in intellect and rich at heart for feeling the need to donate his extreme wealth to worthwhile causes. Gordon is a truly great person! And along with Betty, his wonderful wife, have enjoyed six decades of marriage together while raising two fine sons. They provide great role models within a solid family structure.

Thorough, Disjointed, Worthwhile

More than the typical history of tech, This book delves deeply into the family history of Gordon Moore. While very thorough, the bents of the plural authors come through as a bit uneven. Technology buffs must be patient as the text often suddenly shifts from technology minutiae to family drama to history writ large. But it's worth the wait.

Missed opportunity

This book really needed an editor, and authors who understand recent tech history better. They wasted far too much time on Moore's ancestors (yawn - why do biographers do this?!), while giving short shrift to the massive climax of Wintel PC's. Far too little on how the Wintel desktop phenomenon came about, including IBM's failings (licensing the PC, OS/2, etc) that led to Intel's monopoly on PCs, as well as barely mentioning Intel's Faustian partnership with Microsoft, without which, it's unlikely this happens. I was waiting for this huge explosive point in the industry (and the world, when PC's began to appear on everyone's desk), but the book just breezed past the x86 moment. How did all of this Wintel dominance happen? How did Wintel beat the company that started the personal computer revolution (Apple)? The PC phenommenon was treated as just another iterative chapter in Moore's Law, not the climax of it.

Perhaps even worse, the author never once mentioned how mobile (i.e., ironically, Apple) killed the desktop and how Intel utterly missed the mobile revolution, and has yet to recover from it. The book was published in 2015, and it was obvious by that time that mobile was majorly disruptive to desktops. The authors do note the growing popularity of smartphones and the iPhone, but not ONCE do the authors mention this was where Moore's Law arguably died (mobile chips are what killed Intel's momentum).

It would have been great to hear Moore's take on Intel's mobile failures, since by this time, Intel's directors had foolishly tossed Moore aside as some useless old fossil. Surely Moore has some opinions on how these arrogant younger executives totally whiffed on mobile?!

Also, nothing on the huge irony of how AMD - which probably wouldn't even exist today if not for Intel deliberately second sourcing the 286 - emerged as Intel's biggest rival today. Would love to have heard Moore's current take on this as well as his opinions on Jerry Sanders, but NOTHING! Not even a paragraph on Sanders leaving to found AMD, and Moore's reaction to it!

Instead, the author wasted multiple chapters on the Moore foundation, something Gordon Moore really took little interest in from a management standpoint. And no, 100 years from now, nobody is going to be writing about Moore's (or Gates') charitable foundations (a lot of people hate Gates' creepy post-Microsoft activities). Moore's legacy is probably being the person most responsible for populating the entire world with the most ubiquitous man made device in history, the transistor. An extremely rare combination of technical genius and visionary, (plus a monomaniacal drive and work ethic), which allowed Moore to be able to understand and implement the transistor's disruptive future.

Biography of Moore

I came into this book expecting it to be centered on Moore’s Law and the implications from it. While you do get a lot of information about it, this story is more focused on Gordon Moore’s life and personal interactions. I felt the book went too far in this direction, constantly focusing on Moore’s family life, his personal life outside of work, and much of him and his wife traveling on vacations and buying new houses. These tangents were a little long, and at times it makes you forget that this is a technology book. The other half of it was great though. It’s just chopped up with these sections of focusing on his personal life which is disconnected from the story. It just messed with the flow. Also the narrators a little slow so it might be helpful to speed up to 1.2x for it to sound better.