Moore's law and technological determinism: reflections on the history of technology

Technology and Culture

Volumn 46, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 584-593

  Ceruzzi, Paul E ^a  

^a Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 25144498656     PISSN: 0040165X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/tech.2005.0116     Document Type: Article

References (35)

1. My review appeared in the October 2004 issue of this journal, Technology and Culture 45 (2004): 892-93.
2. A variant, in which PNP-type transistors alternate with NPN types, is called "complementary MOS," or CMOS, and has the advantage of requiring very little power.
3. Gordon E. Moore, "Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits," Electronics, 19 April 1965, 114-17.
4. ((y-1959) ÷ d), where n is the number of circuits on a chip, y is the current year, and d is the doubling time, in years. For a doubling time of eighteen months, or d = 1.5, this equation predicts chip densities of about one billion in 2005. Chips with that density are not yet available commercially as far as I know, but are being developed in laboratories.
5. For early discussions on this topic among the principals, see Gordon E. Moore, "Progress in Digital Integrated Electronics" (paper presented at the International Electronic Devices Meeting, Washington, D.C., 1-3 December 1975, technical digest 11-13);
6. Robert N. Noyce, "Microelectronics," Scientific American 237 (September 1977): 65.
7. See, for example, Stephen H. Cutcliffe and Robert C. Post, eds., In Context: History and the History of Technology - Essays in Honor of Melvin Kranzberg (Bethlehem, Pa., 1989).
8. See, for example, Merritt Roe Smith and Leo Marx, eds., Does Technology Drive History? The Dilemma of Technological Determinism (Cambridge, Mass., 1994).
9. For example, Donald MacKenzie and Judy Wajcman, eds., The Social Shaping of Technology, 2nd ed. (Buckingham, 1999);
10. Wiebe Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems (Cambridge, Mass., 1987).
11. Mel Kranzberg, "The Newest History: Science and Technology," Science, 11 May 1962, 463-68.
12. Rosalind Williams, "All that Is Solid Melts into Air: Historians of Technology in the Information Revolution," Technology and Culture 41 (2000): 641-68.
13. See also her more recent book, Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological Change (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).
14. Williams, "All that Is Solid," 641.
15. I can no longer make such repairs, as the engine and basic components of the car I now drive are inaccessible. Its ignition, fuel, brake, and other systems are all heavily computerized.
16. Robert C. Post, "A Narrative for Our Time: The Enola Gay 'and after that, period,'" Technology and Culture 45 (2004): 373-95.
17. But see also his "No Mere Technicalities: How Things Work and Why It Matters," Technology and Culture 40 (1999): 607-22, which expresses Post's concerns about the way historians of technology react to claims that "life without technology isn't an option."
18. Ellen Rose, User Error: Resisting Computer Culture (Toronto, 2003).
19. The Apollo Guidance Computer had a read-write memory capacity of two thousand sixteen-bit words, or four thousand bytes. See the History of Recent Science and Technology project web pages for the Apollo Guidance Computer, http://hrst.mit.edu/hrs/apollo/public/, accessed July 2005.
20. The calculator was a Hewlett-Packard HP-25C. The letter "C" meant that it used CMOS chips, novel at that time.
21. Jennifer S. Light, "When Computers Were Women," Technology and Culture 40 (1999): 455-83.
22. Edward Tufte, "Power Corrupts: PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely, " Wired, September 2003, 118-19;
23. also Ian Parker, "Absolute PowerPoint," New Yorker, 28 May 2001, 86-87.
24. This is the title of Tufte's article cited above, of course, but I heard Cerf use the phrase on the two occasions when we were on the same program as speakers; we were the only two who did not use PowerPoint.
25. The essay was published in print in various places, but I found it on the World-wide Web at http://www.tipiglen.dircon.co.uk/berrynot.html (accessed July 2005).
26. Rose (n. 14 above), 175. She is referring to Neil Postman, who proudly claimed that he wrote all his work by hand.
27. This happened to me as I was preparing this essay.
28. George W. Hilton, American Narrow Gauge Railroads (Stanford, Calif., 1990).
29. And this does not address the question whether one can still read the disk on which a document was stored.
30. Paul Ceruzzi, "A War on Two Fronts: The U.S. Justice Department, Open Source, and Microsoft, 1995-2000," Iterations, an on-line journal, http://www.cbi.umn.edu/iterations/ceruzzi.html (accessed July 2005). Among colleagues in SHOT, I note that Bryan Pffafenberger, of the University of Virginia, uses open source software. At home I use several open-source programs, but my employer in general does not allow them at work. GNU, a recursive acronym for "GNU's Not UNIX," is, among other things, an open-source operating system.
31. The best are written by computer-industry insiders. See, for example, Clifford Stoll, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Superhighway (New York, 1996);
32. Ben Shneiderman, Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies (Cambridge, Mass., 2003);
33. Steve Talbott, The Future Does Not Compute (Sebastopol, Calif., 1995);
34. Thomas K. Landauer, The Trouble with Computers: Usefulness, Usability, and Productivity (Cambridge, Mass., 1995);
35. Donald A. Norman, The Invisible Computer: Why Good Products Fail, the Personal Computer Is so Complex, and Information Appliances Are the Solution (Cambridge, Mass., 1998).