Moore's law
Gordon Moore observed that the number of components on a chip doubles each year and suggested it would hold for a decade.
Why it matters
Computation stopped being a fixed resource: whatever did not fit today became feasible within a few years.
Moore had four data points and forecast to 1975; in 1975 he revised the rate to a doubling every two years. The observation became a planning target for the industry. In this atlas it marks a precondition: 1960s models were limited less by ideas than by the memory and speed of the machines available.