An important anniversary in the annals of technology occurred last week. On April 19, 1965 a young Gordon Moore first graphed the progress of technology improvement that would come to bear his name.

Moore observed 50 years ago that the performance (speed, price, size) of microchips regularly doubled every 18 months. Moore was working at chip maker Fairchild Semiconductor, still going strong all these years later, but of course he would later go on to co-found chip giant Intel.

Moore's initial plot later showed up in an article he wrote for Electronics magazine. And though he was not the only one at the time to make the same basic observation, a decade or so later the idea became known as "Moore's Law," perhaps the most famous concept in tech industry history.

In the image of the initial plot nearby, the progress looks like a nearly straight diagonal line. But that is because it is plotted as a logarithmic function. If it was plotted more conventionally, it would show what today would like slow progress in early years, and then explode upward in terms of processing power.

Many over the years have predicted the end of Moore's Law, as chip technology would eventually hit a wall. And indeed, the pace of progress in recent years has slowed by about half, meaning performance is improving roughly 50% every 18 months - still a pretty rapid pace.

Just as importantly, Moore's Law is being applied to other areas besides chip technology - basically anything "digital" or digital-like - from 3D printing to mapping the human genome.

SCDigest editor Dan Gilmore wrote the following in 2013, after hearing a presentation by famed technology inventory Ray Kurzweil after he gave a keynote presentation at the JDA Software user conference that year:

"Digital genius and inventor Ray Kurzweil gave a keynote presentation on what the real ramifications are for the never-ending exponential growth of information-based technologies. When the project to map the human genome was only 1% complete in 7 years, for example, "linear" thinkers fretted about the slow pace. Kurzweil instead said "Great, we're almost done." Sure enough, the whole project was complete another 7 years later (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, etc.)," Gilmore wrote.

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