What's not fully realized is that Moore's Law was not the first paradigm to bring exponential growth to computers. We had electromechanical calculators, relay-based computers, vacuum tubes, and transistors. Every time one paradigm ran out of steam, another took over.

— Raymond Kurzweil, The New Humanists: Science at the Edge (2003)

From his chapter "The Singularity" in The New Humanists (2003).

Topics: history of computing