The letter of the law.
It was in 1965 that Gordon Moore, an electrical engineer, first formulated his
now famous law. The article in which he did this can be found here.
References to, and discussions of, the law abound on the web. The Wikipedia has
a very good review of the
basic literature on the law, and its ramifications. That review includes a
down to earth, non-technical formulation of the law:
Although Moore's law has since the 1970s been defined
in terms of the number of transistors on a chip, it is common to refer to Moore's
law in reference to the rapid continuing advance in computing power per dollar
cost.
Which, as anyone who has bought a new computer only to discover that by the time
it gets home it's already outdated, means that computers are constantly getting
more powerful at less cost. Not only is that the sort of definition that I can
understand (and sympathize with), it's also basically what
I mean when I refer to the law in general.
Go to: Me and Moore's Law.