integrated circuit doubles every year. It was later revised to a more useful formulation: the performance of an integrated circuit doubles every eighteen to twenty-four months. Metcalfe’s Law, named for a founder of 3Com, said that the value of any network would increase as the square of the number of nodes. Bigger networks are geometrically more valuable than small ones. Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law reinforced each other. As the price of computers fell, the benefits of connecting them rose. It took fifty years, but we eventually connected every computer. The result was the
