Sad news in the tech world this week as Intel co-founder Gordon Moore passed away in Hawaii at the age of 94. Along with Robert Noyce in 1968, Moore founded NM Electronics, the company that would later go on to become Intel Corporation and give the world the first commercially available microprocessor, the 4004, in 1971. The four-bit microprocessor would be joined a few years later by the 8008 and 8080, chips that paved the way for the PC revolution to come. Surprisingly, Moore was not an electrical engineer but a chemist, earning his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology in 1954 before his postdoctoral research at the prestigious Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins. He briefly worked alongside Nobel laureate and transistor co-inventor William Shockley before jumping ship with Noyce and others to found Fairchild Semiconductor, which is where he made the observation that integrated circuit component density doubled roughly every two years. This calculation would go on to be known as “Moore’s Law.”
Also in deceased tech billionaire news, a freak accident happened in Scotland involving the R/V Petrel, a research ship that was once owned by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The 76-meter ship was in a dry dock in Leith undergoing a refit when it toppled over during a windstorm. Twenty-three people were transported to local hospitals, while twelve people with minor injuries were treated on the scene. Allen bought Petrel in 2016 and had it outfitted for deep-sea exploration, using it extensively to search for downed warships like the USS Indianapolis, the ship that was torpedoed after having delivered the first atomic bomb to the island of Tinian in 1945. The accide ..
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