content: Moores Law at 50: Its past and its future. (Link in comments.) Link. Excerpt: If we look at the progress of computing in the 30 years before Moore wrote his article, we can chart the gains in processing power from the 1 cycle per second of Konrad Zuse’s 1938 Z1 mechanical computer — arguably the first true programmable model with a modern architecture  — to the 3MFLOPs of the 1965 CDC 6600. Even if we charitably grant the Z1 1FLOP, the gain corresponds to the doubling of compute power every 12 to 18 months during that time — similar to the rate projected by Moore for integrated circuits, but across several different physical implementations. In his book on The Singularity, Ray Kurzweil goes even further back, compiling data since 1900 and the mechanical tabulator.