Should probably change this to "was appearance of incredible pace of compute growth due to Moore's Law," because even my basic CS classes from 15 years ago were teaching that it was drastically slowing down, and isn't really a "law" more than an observational trend that lasted a few decades. There are limits to how small you can make transistors and we're not too far from it, at least not what would continue to yield the results of that curve.

The corollary to Moores law, that computers get twice as fast every 18 months, died by 2010. People who didn't live through the 80s, 90s and early 00s, where you'd get a computer ten times as fast every 5 years, can't imagine what it was like back then.

Today the only way to scale compute is to throw more power at it or settle for the 5% per year real single core performance improvement.