There are people who leave their strongest mark on the world without making the slightest noise. In the world of technology, this was not uncommon in the past, as those who worked there enjoyed research and discovery more than interviews. Gordon Earl Moore, who died on March 24 at the age of 94, was one such quiet rebel.

Most of us remember him because of the famous law that bears his name. In 1965, Moore predicted that the number of transistors that could fit on a silicon chip would regularly double for the foreseeable future, thus exponentially increasing the processing power of computers. “Moore’s Law” continues to be confirmed to this day, although the rate of exponential growth is expected to stop soon, as he himself pointed out. At some point, we won’t be able to make smaller chips.

“I just saw,” he told journalist Michael Malone in 2000, “that microprocessors will make electronics much cheaper. That was the message I was trying to get across. It turned out to be an amazingly accurate prediction—much more accurate than I thought.” However, this law, in fact, became the basis of all the breakthrough changes that have taken place over the past few decades in the digital world. Without the confirmation of Moore’s Law, we would not have social networks, we would not have artificial intelligence or smart devices, we would not have a digital state.

His official biography is aptly titled Moore’s Law. The Life of a Quiet Silicon Valley Rebel.” The life of young Gordon did not seem brilliant at first. From an early age, he gained a reputation as an introvert. Born January 3, 1929 in Pescantero, San Francisco. His father was a deputy sheriff and his mother was a housewife. He studied chemistry and received his PhD from the prestigious California Institute of Technology in 1954. He moved to Johns Hopkins doing postdoctoral research in physics. Finding a job was not easy for him. Initially, he wanted to become a teacher. But after a series of failed attempts, he received a phone call that changed his life forever. Dr. William Shockley, Nobel Prize winner, one of the inventors of transistors, invites him to work at the start-up Shokley Semiconductors. Later, Shockley turns out to be a cruel employer, so Moore and seven other colleagues leave the company in 1957, become the traitorous eight, and, with a $500 investment each, found Fairchild Semiconductors. In one of Moore’s laboratories, one of his groups makes a great discovery: the first silicon integrated circuit, now known as the “microchip.” Somehow, along with the dawn of the electronic age, Moore’s career as an “accidental entrepreneur” begins.

Ten years later, in 1968, Moore, along with Robert Noyce, founded a new company, Intel, whose name comes from the words “integrated electronics”. The company is headquartered in Mountain View, California, right in the middle of what would later be called Silicon Valley. The work of Moore and Noyce, and later Andrew Gove, was to build ever more complex microprocessors on bits of silicon. Initially, they specialized in memory chips. Along the way, they expanded to other genres. His biographers write that the “intel inside” logo speaks to both the chips and the introversion of their co-founder.

Intel’s success has been monumental. Moore laid the foundation for the digital revolution by investing in the most important computing unit, the increasingly invisible microprocessors. In 1973, he told a reporter: “After all, the revolutionaries today are us, and not the guys with long hair and beards who occupied the schools a few years ago.” Moore could cash in on this reputation, but he always preferred to be modest, even seeking to downplay his major contribution to the IT boom. “At the heart of Moore’s psyche,” his biographers note, “was the desire to impress by minimizing attention to oneself.”

In 2014, Forbes magazine estimated his net worth at $7 billion. He attributed his achievements to luck, characteristically saying: “I was extremely lucky to be at the origins of these developments.” He really was in the right place at the right time, but, as his biographers say, “he was also the right person.” In both public and private life, Moore kept a surprisingly low profile. He preferred casual clothes to suits, enjoyed fishing and shopping in his favorite stores. He was a closed family man. Together with his wife, Betty, they developed a rich and significant charitable work through their organization, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. They had two sons together. In their case, the so-called “American Dream” had nothing to do with the boastfulness and narcissism that often accompanies great wealth. Gordon Moore, “the quiet prophet of the electronic revolution”, was, according to his biographers, a humble and resilient man, but he was also “the most important thinker and figure in the history of silicon electronics”. What he will be remembered for predicting — “the epitome of his quiet ability to focus, execute, and deliver” — aptly cements his legacy by raising a timely question: after all, are the real revolutionaries the ones who don’t achieve great things? business? noise;