Java™ How To Program (Early Objects), Tenth Edition

1.2.1 Moore’s Law

Every year, you probably expect to pay at least a little more for most products and services. The opposite has been the case in the computer and communications fields, especially with regard to the hardware supporting these technologies. For many decades, hardware costs have fallen rapidly.

Every year or two, the capacities of computers have approximately doubled inexpensively. This remarkable trend often is called Moore’s Law, named for the person who identified it in the 1960s, Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel—the leading manufacturer of the processors in today’s computers and embedded systems. Moore’s Law and related observations apply especially to the amount of memory that computers have for programs, the amount of secondary ...