In the early 1970's, Carver Mead coined the term "Moore's Law." This law has colloquially been detailed as "processor speed doubles every two years." Some people use the time span of 18 months.
The law stemmed from statements Intel co-founder Gordon Moore made close to 1965 describing minimizing cost by, "cramming more components onto integrated circuits." Moore detailed that, in 1965, the number of components in a given space, "has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year." Of course, Moore goes on to suggest that, "over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain."
I'm sure Moore had not expected that the rate of increase would have continued for roughly another 40 years before reaching physical and atomic limitations, making the effort (and thus the cost) of putting more components into a given space extremely prohibitive.
The fact that processing speed, until very recently, had increased at expected amounts within a given...