Chapter TwelveJust-in-Time Guidance
Calhoun W. Wick
Roy V. H. PollockKnowledge in motion is a product of the digital revolution—the
extraordinary progress in microelectronics that has transformed our
ability to gather, process, store, and disseminate information. That
progress is measured in orders of magnitude and necessitates a
reexamination of the way in which knowledge is organized and
conveyed.
Thirty years ago, Gordon Moore, cofounder of Intel, observed
that the number of transistors that could be placed in a given area
and the number of computations that could be performed per sec-
ond had doubled roughly every year. He predicted that this trend
would continue. His prediction, now known as “Moore’s law,” has
proved uncannily correct.
When Moore made his prediction in 1965, his laboratory held
the most complex computer chip ever built: it contained 64 tran-
sistors. In contrast, the Pentium III chip, introduced in 2000, con-
tained 28 million transistors. At the time of Moore’s prediction, a
hard disk system capable of storing two megabytes (million bytes)
of information cost $50,000 and was the size of a filing cabinet.
Today, disks costing one one-hundredth as much store 10,000 times
more information and fit in laptop computers. Despite the daunt-
ing technical challenges to continued progress—for one thing,
components have become so small that they are running up against
the laws of quantum physics—most computer scientists believe
that Moore’s law will apply for another decade.
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