Gordon Moore
loreprogramming
The Fairchild and later Intel co-founder whose 1965 article observed that the number of components per integrated circuit was doubling on a regular cadence.
It was an observation about economics with a horizon of about a decade, and it became a planning assumption for fifty years - and then, quietly, an industry roadmap that vendors organised themselves to meet, which is a different thing from a law of nature. The useful reading for anyone sizing infrastructure is that the curve was always about cost per transistor rather than speed, and that the two stopped moving together long before anyone announced it.
Also known as: moore, moore's law