In 1965, Gordon Moore was preparing a speech and made a memorable observation. When he started to graph data about the growth in memory chip performance, he realized there was a striking trend. Each new chip contained roughly twice as much capacity as its predecessor, and each chip was released within 18-24 months of the previous chip. If this trend continued, he reasoned, computing power would rise exponentially over relatively brief periods of time.

Moore's observation, now known as Moore's Law, described a trend that has continued and is still remarkably accurate. It is the basis for many planners' performance forecasts. In 26 years the number of transistors on a chip has increased more than 3,200 times, from 2,300 on the 4004 in 1971 to 7.5 million on the Pentium® II process

	Machrone's Law "Gordon Moore just plain got it right . . . I should also mention that Moore's Law has also given rise to Machrone's Law, which was true for many years, which is that the machine you want always costs $5,000."
	-Bill Machrone
	Rock's Law "A very small addendum to Moore's Law is Rock's Law which says that the cost of capital equipment to build semiconductors will double every four years."
	-Arthur Rock