In keeping with AT&T’s agreement with the federal government, the patents for these inventions and processes were licensed to a number of other companies, not only large industrial shops like General Electric and RCA, but also two fledgling semiconductor companies known as Texas Instruments and Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild had been established after its principal engineers, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, had fled Bill Shockley’s unhappy company along with several other colleagues to start a company of their own.
