I was having a discussion with a friend about the economic impetus for driving Moore's Law, self-fulfilling or otherwise. The concept being that the return made from one technology can be invested into developer smaller transistors that will in return be invested, this process taking about 18 months, the exponential increase given by combination of demand and decrease in manufacturing cost. The 'big question' regarding Moore's Law is of course when/whether it has reached its limit, and what happens when it does.

A more interesting question that we stumbled upon was looking back at the 20th century, and wondering whether Moore's Law held true in all economic models. In particular, we were curious about the development of technology in the Soviet Union, as that was a radically different social and economic situation and how that affected growth of technology. Of course some could be attributed to espionage, but the Soviet Union would have been more of a closed system than, say, post-WW2 Japan. But neither of us really know anything about the Soviet Union.

Do any of you guys know much about the Soviet Union, or Moore's Law, or technology in the Soviet Union?

I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't follow Moore's trend simply because of your statement about being an open system.

Well, computing in the west did follow Moore's Law and if the Soviet Union was open to trade with the West it should too. But I think the USSR developed at least some of their own computers, and I wonder if they followed the same trend.

Or rather, I wouldn't be surprised if it did or didn't follow Moore's law, and instead followed whatever the rest of the world was doing and how often they stole that. I don't imagine they did much work on their own that others weren't already doing.

i think i remember hearing from something that when apple started making pc's the soviet union got access to the technology and the higher ups rejected it in favor of larger mainframe style computers... that could be totally inaccurate though...

Moore's law has a hard limit in any particular technology. A processor is only going to get so fast how they are built today - And that limit appears to be just shy of 4ghz. So while what Moore actually said might be coming to an end, the spirit lives on by moving to other technologies. Now, processors get faster not by increasing the speed of an individual core but by adding more cores. And then they get faster by increasing cache sizes and speed. And so on.

Moore's law doesn't really have anything to do with frequency.

Some research shows that the Soviet Union mostly used clones of western processors. The few microprocessors that they developed used a large 6um process.

They had cloned 8086s, I bet Intel felt cool knowing the Soviets spent time and money to spy on them.

Right, just like platter density limitations prevented hard drives from exceeding 80Gb.