It is a triumph of technology and of economics that our computer chips are so universal. Countless applications are only possible because of the staggering variety of calculations that modern chips can compute. But, this was not always the case. Computers used to be specialized, doing only...

“Computing performance doubles every couple of years” is the popular re-phrasing of Moore's Law, which describes the 500,000-fold increase in the number of transistors on modern computer chips. But what impact has this 50-year expansion of the technological frontier of computing had on the...