My family recently sat down to watch the all-time classic movie, Babe. In early July, we lost our fourteen-year-old Aussie mix, who looked quite a bit like Fly, the female Border Collie in the film. I suppose that this was our incentive to enjoy this flick (again). I refer to it as a classic, because: 1) It’s really a heart-warming story; 2) It was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture; 3) It basically launched James Cromwell’s mega-successful acting career; 4) I dare you to watch the movie and try to avoid singing or humming the theme song, “If I Had Words,” for the next few days. But of central importance to this post is the comment that my wife Helen made to me when we cranked up the old VCR and hit play. (Yes, we still have a VCR and we eventually found our old VHS copy of Babe.) Helen laughed at the poor, pre-HD quality of the movie, and how “fuzzy” it was. In addition, there was no immediate fast forwarding, rewinding, subtitles, and all of the other DVD and streaming features that we’ve become accustomed to. We certainly have become spoiled in a relatively short period of time.
And that brings me to the impetus of this blog. Most people have no clue as to what Moore’s Law represents, or who Moore is for that matter. But “his” concept has impacted the daily lives of virtually everyone on the entire planet. I had first heard of this “law” when I was a young Product Manager working for a company that supplied assemblies for semiconductor manufacturers. Not to get all nerdy on you, but Gordon E. Moore is the co-founder of Intel, the inventor of the processors found in most personal computers. In 1965, Moore stated that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles approximately every two years, while the cost of the technology is essentially cut in half. This observation became known as Moore’s Law. (Moore is currently 91 years old, and worth roughly $12 billion.) To simplify, this meant that the integrated circuits found in computers, eventually in phones, and in most other electronic devices were becoming exponentially smaller, cheaper and more powerful. Who cares? Take a look at your laptops, flat panel TVs and monitors, and cell phones, among other gadgets. Every year, electronics are becoming smaller, cheaper and much more powerful.
I’m basically a cross-over Baby Boomer / Generation Xer. When I was a kid, my mom bought my dad a VCR, which weighed approximately 20 pounds and had a hard-wired “remote” control. We had never seen such a magnificent device. Such high tech! (The first VHS tape that my dad, an attorney, owned was a law school movie called The Paper Chase. He soon owned hundreds of manually-recorded tapes featuring TV movies and ND football games, complete with commercials.) As many of us know, VCRs gave way to DVDs, which gave way to flash drives, which gave way to wireless streaming…. With the advent of Netflix and Amazon Prime (et al), most of our kids have no clue what a DVD is, and a VCR might as well be a spaceship.
When the Internet first became “mainstream,” I recall sitting at lunch with one of our company engineers who explained this bizarre concept to me. Why would people want to share information to global strangers, and out of the kindness of their hearts? I soon owned a lightning-quick (AOL, LOL!) dial-up modem, and I began surfing the web. (Reading material was an essential sidekick to pass the time while connections were made.) As I was the Director of Marketing for my employer, it was my responsibility to create our multi-million dollar company’s first website, using a canned program. This decision was not made lightly, as many companies debated the need to “sell their goods via this Internet contraption that most people won’t use, and to give away all of their intellectual property.” Now, companies have departments devoted to maintaining their web presence, and kids don’t know how to complete their homework assignments without using Google. (And to think, many of us actually had to have our parents drive us to the local library and spend days performing tasks that our kids now handle in minutes.).
Those my age migrated from “snail mail” to fax machines to email to text messaging, and each evolution led to the virtual obsolescence of its predecessor. I didn’t own a cell phone until my late twenties or early thirties. Music underwent a similar revolution, moving from records to 8-tracks to cassettes to CDs to MP3s to streaming services. Many of us didn’t have our own desk top computer, either at home or at work, until we were adults. Now cell phones are virtually glued to everyone’s hands, and kids own laptops, iPads, cell phones, and all sorts of video game devices. For our kids, text messaging has given way to Snapchat and Instagram, and their addiction to TikTok makes you wonder how well they would do in school if their devotion to homework was similar.
You know, I think that this Moore guy was onto something. As Farmer Hoggett said to Babe, “That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.”