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company. It was 1957. Leading the group of eight was an Iowa-born physicist named Robert Noyce, a minister’s son and former champion diver, with a doctorate from MIT and a mind so quick (and a way with the ladies so effortless) that his graduate-school friends called him “Rapid Robert.”
“My hobby is handicraft,” he wrote in 1939. “I like this hobby because it is useful. You can make things cheaply that are worth a lot.”10
This meant that given a big enough system with enough interconnections, even if every component in a system had a reliability of better than 99 percent, failure was statistically possible within the first two minutes of operation. The interconnections, often shorthanded the “tyranny of numbers,” were the industry’s Achilles’ heel.
Noyce liked to say that the real impetus for the integrated
Gordon Moore has said that Noyce’s decision to lower prices to stimulate demand so that the production volumes could grow and the cost of
Or a researcher could try the “quick and dirty” way, moving forward with an idea as soon as a rather rudimentary test indicates it will probably work. Noyce believed that the quick-and-dirty method generated “90 percent of the answer in 10 percent of the time.” He
Noyce also pushed Hobart to use stock options as an incentive tool.
Noyce thought, could be the “standard 2-by-4 or 6-penny nail” in the electronics industry. As things stood now, engineers at computer companies designed every plank and nail equivalent used in their systems.60
Noyce made sure at some point to ask, in an offhanded way, why the customer did not just buy a computer and program it to do the task. The answer was always the same: I could do that, but it’s too expensive. This research further reinforced Noyce’s own hunch that the microprocessor could be used in dozens of potential applications—not only in computers, but also in areas largely untouched by microelectronics, such as cars and home appliances—if the price was right.61
Andy Grove wanted the microprocessor to go away. Bob Graham felt the company already had enough to do just selling memory chips. How could they sell microprocessors?
He could picture the devices used in “traffic control—stop lights” or in “gas pumps.”72
A few board members feared that the microprocessor might push the company into the systems business. Intel, like most other semiconductor companies, sold individual circuits that customers would plug into systems of their own design. But this four-chip microprocessor family Hoff had designed was already a system in itself. Some board members worried that a move to market the microprocessor would put Intel in the position of competing with its own customers,
Noyce had begun Intel with the expectation that the day would come when semiconductor companies would also build the computer systems that used their circuits—that is, in fact, one reason why Noyce hired Hoff, with his expertise in computer systems—but this was far from a universally accepted opinion.74
To use the microprocessor, customers had to change their thinking. Before the microprocessor, designers at Intel’s customer firms built their systems by configuring individual integrated circuits, each with a different dedicated function, on a board. Changing the system required changing the physical arrangement of the integrated circuits, or hardware. Intel’s new microprocessor systems required something very different—changes made not by moving physical objects, but by reprogramming the instructions stored in program memory. The microprocessor, in other words, brought software to the
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Noyce was proud of his ability to calm hostile customers, but his favorite part of his job was what he called the “missionary work … to spread the word about microprocessors.” He certainly adopted a bit of a religious zeal about the microprocessor-driven world-to-come and was happy to talk about it in the most unlikely places.
“Everybody,” he said, “I want you to see this.” He held up a silicon wafer about three inches in diameter and printed with microprocessors. “This is going to change the world. It’s going to revolutionize your home. In your own house,” he continued, clearly caught up in the moment, “you’ll all have computers. You will have access to all sorts of information. You won’t need money any more. Everything will happen electronically.”
But Noyce was trying to make people understand that a computer could be as small as a few chips you could hold in your hand.
Noyce’s quick response—“You wouldn’t care. It would just cost a few dollars to replace it”—sparked more than a few disbelieving laughs. Ted Hoff recalls a similarly unconvinced audience member asking him about microprocessor repairs—where would you take the chip to have it fixed, and would they do it under a microscope? Hoff explained that you would just throw away the chip and buy a new one.91
This was not particularly easy work. It required promoting a vision of the future that corresponded in only the most tenuous ways to the realities of the available technology.
In other words, the GM executives found it nearly impossible to believe that a slice of silicon could do the work of a computer—and in 1971, Noyce almost certainly told them, their skepticism was well grounded. No one would want the 4004 controlling the brakes
By December of 1972, Noyce’s optimism had proven well founded. Intel was entirely debt free and had more than doubled revenues and tripled profits. Just one year later, when Intel’s fifth anniversary coincided with a boom in the industry, the company’s revenues and profits again tripled, and so, too, did the number of its employees and its manufacturing space. Intel’s pretax profit margin was a remarkable 40 percent (25 percent after tax).6
but in 1973 Noyce predicted that of all the electronics technology available anywhere in the world, “the thing that we will see make the most difference will be the extension of the microcomputer [microprocessor] into just about everything.”
The technical progress had been equally rapid: a silicon transistor that cost $20 when Fairchild introduced it in 1959 now could be bought (inside an 1103) for less than one-tenth of a penny.
By the early 1960s, for example, a dozen Hewlett-Packard executives set up a business-based “drinking club.” Each man promised to keep his door and ears open to electronics entrepreneurs and paid monthly “dues” of about $100. At the monthly “meeting,” held at one or another fellow’s home, the group would share a few drinks, and anyone who had heard of an exciting investment opportunity would talk about it. The group would then decide how much, if any, of their pooled money to invest in the company. After a half-dozen years, this little drinking group—which adopted the name “Page Mill
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It needed to build on the hills already occupied. That meant manufacturing in massive quantities and making incremental improvements in existing technologies.69
