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January 20 - March 29, 2020
Grove arrived in the United States a year later and, as he taught himself English, was able to graduate first in his class at City College of New York and then earn a PhD in chemical engineering from Berkeley. He joined Fairchild in 1963 right out of Berkeley, and in his spare time wrote a college textbook titled Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices.
“We started a form of company culture that was completely different than anything had been before. It was a culture of meritocracy.”
At these meetings everyone was treated as an equal and could challenge the prevailing wisdom. Noyce was there not as a boss but as a pastor guiding them to make their own decisions. “This wasn’t a corporation,” Wolfe concluded. “It was a congregation.”
He grew his sideburns long and his mustache droopy and wore open shirts with gold chains dangling over his chest hair.
He never put on airs, but he never let down his guard. In contrast to Noyce’s sweet gentility, Grove had a blunt, no-bullshit style. It was the same approach Steve Jobs would later use: brutal honesty, clear focus, and a demanding drive for excellence.
“He was a taskmaster. He had very strong views about what you should do and what you shouldn’t do and he was very direct about that.”
Because it was essentially a computer processor on a chip, the new device was dubbed a microprocessor. In November 1971 Intel unveiled the product, the Intel 4004, to the public.
“The essence of a ‘hack’ is that it is done quickly, and is usually inelegant.”3
Innovation can be sparked by engineering talent, but it must be combined with business skills to set the world afire.
He decided to name the new company Syzygy, a barely pronounceable term for when three celestial bodies are in a line. Fortunately, that name was not available because a hippie candle-making commune had registered it. So Bushnell decided to call his new venture Atari, adopting a term from the Japanese board game Go.
Consciously or not, Atari had hit upon one of the most important engineering challenges of the computer age: creating user interfaces that were radically simple and intuitive.
“We found out that our lifestyle and the parties were hugely good for attracting workers. If we were trying to hire somebody, we’d invite him to one of our parties.”
Innovation requires having at least three things: a great idea, the engineering talent to execute it, and the business savvy (plus deal-making moxie) to turn it into a successful product.
“Engineering the game was easy. Growing the company without money was hard.”
The creation of a triangular relationship among government, industry, and academia was, in its own way, one of the significant innovations that helped produce the technological revolution of the late twentieth century.
First, every one of the universities and research centers that had a contract with ARPA wanted the latest computers with the most capabilities. That was wasteful and duplicative. There might be a computer that did graphics in Salt Lake City and another that mined data at Stanford, but a researcher who needed to perform both tasks either had to go back and forth by plane or ask IPTO to fund another computer. Why couldn’t they be connected by a network that allowed them to time-share each other’s computer?
The first RFC went out on April 7, 1969, mailed in old-fashioned envelopes through the postal system.
Having worked on the ARPANET and then PRNET, he made it his mission to create a method to connect them and other packet networks, a system that he and his colleagues began calling an “internetwork.” After a while, that word got shortened a bit, to “internet.”
Technology was a tool for expression that could expand the boundaries of creativity and, like drugs and rock, be rebellious.
“I see God in the instruments and mechanisms that work reliably.”
He was designing a computer as if he were a humanist as well as an engineer.
He drew inspiration from an Italian printer in the early sixteenth century named Aldus Manutius, who realized that personal books would need to fit into saddlebags and thus produced ones of the size now common.
“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
“I only hired people that got stars in their eyes when they heard about the notebook computer idea,”
“We chose to provide a full bitmap, in which each screen pixel was represented by a bit of main storage,” Thacker explained. That put a lot of demands on the memory, but the guiding principle was that Moore’s Law would continue to rule and that memory would get cheaper in an exponential way.
That is why Engelbart, even though he was a prescient theorist, was not truly a successful innovator: he kept adding functions and instructions and buttons and complexities to his system.
The executives, all of whom were male, showed little interest, but their wives immediately started testing the mouse and typing away. “The men thought it was beneath them to know how to type,” said Taylor, who had not been invited to the conference but showed up anyway. “It was something secretaries did. So they didn’t take the Alto seriously, thinking that only women would like it.
He acquired a faith in the power of computers to help people take control of their lives and form communities. If they could use computers as tools for personal empowerment and learning, he believed, ordinary folks could break free of the dominance of the military-industrial establishment.
“Computers are mostly used against people instead of for people; used to control people instead of to free them; Time to change all that—we need a PEOPLE’S COMPUTER COMPANY.”
In those pre-Internet days, before Craigslist and Facebook, there were community organizations known as Switchboards that served to make connections among people and link them to services they might be seeking. Most were low-tech, usually just a few people around a table with a couple of phones and a lot of cards and flyers tacked to the walls; they served as routers to create social networks.
“I want computers to be the tools that connect people and to be in harmony with them.”
“The roots of the personal computer can be found in the Free Speech Movement that arose at Berkeley in 1964 and in the Whole Earth Catalog, which did the marketing for the do-it-yourself ideals behind the personal computer movement.”
Public awareness is an important component of innovation. A computer created in, say, a basement in Iowa that no one writes about becomes, for history, like a tree falling in Bishop Berkeley’s uninhabited forest; it’s not obvious that it makes a sound.
“The era of the computer in every home—a favorite topic among science-fiction writers—has arrived!” the lede of the Popular Electronics story exclaimed.114 For the first time, a workable and affordable computer was being marketed to the general public. “To my mind,” Bill Gates would later declare, “the Altair is the first thing that deserves to be called a personal computer.”
“As a baby, he used to rock back and forth in his cradle himself,” recalled his father, a successful and gentle lawyer.
Gates’s mother, a respected civic leader from a prominent Seattle banking family, was known for her strong will, but she soon found that she was no match for her son.
“He was a nerd before the term was even invented,”
In struggling to explain what he loved about the computer, Gates later said it was the simple beauty of its logical rigor, something that he had cultivated in his own thinking. “When you use a computer, you can’t make fuzzy statements. You make only precise statements.”
“He was really competitive,” Allen said of Gates. “He wanted to show you how smart he was. And he was really, really persistent.”14
One trait that differentiated the two was focus. Allen’s mind would flit among many ideas and passions, but Gates was a serial obsessor.
Around that time, he started informing people, in a matter-of-fact way, that he would make a million dollars before he turned thirty. He woefully underestimated himself; at age thirty he would be worth $350 million.
They created a Monopoly game with random-number generators to roll the dice, and Gates indulged his fascination with Napoleon (also a math wizard) by concocting a complex war game.
The C-Cubed executive who became their mentor was none other than Steve “Slug” Russell, the creative and wry programmer who as a student at MIT had created Spacewar.
Gates applied only to three colleges his senior year—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton—and he took different approaches to each. “I was born to apply for college,” he boasted, fully aware of his ability to ace meritocratic processes. For Yale he cast himself as an aspiring political type and emphasized a monthlong summer internship he had done in Congress. For Princeton, he focused only on his desire to be a computer engineer. And for Harvard, he said his passion was math. He had also considered MIT, but at the last moment blew off the interview to play pinball. He was accepted to all three and
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In a graduate-level economics class, he met a student who lived down the hall of his dorm. Steve Ballmer was very different from Gates on the surface.
At night they would fan out the printouts on the floor and search for ways to make it more elegant, compact, and efficient.
Gates was able to win two provisions that would be historically significant. He insisted that he and Allen would retain ownership of the software; MITS would merely have rights to license it. He also required that MITS use its “best efforts” to sublicense the software to other computer makers, splitting the revenues with Gates and Allen.
Of them all, Gates was the prime example of the innovator’s personality. “An innovator is probably a fanatic, somebody who loves what they do, works day and night, may ignore normal things to some degree and therefore be viewed as a bit imbalanced,” he said. “Certainly in my teens and 20s, I fit that model.”68 He would work, as he had at Harvard, in bursts that could last up to thirty-six hours, and then curl up on the floor of his office and fall asleep.
Born with a risk-taking gene, Gates would cut loose late at night by driving at terrifying speeds up the mountain roads to an abandoned cement plant. “Sometimes I wondered why Bill drove so fast,” Allen said. “I decided it was his way of letting off steam. He’d get so wound up in our work that he needed a way to stop thinking about the business and the code for a while.
At the Huntsville Holiday Inn, sixty people, a mix of hippyish hobbyists and crew-cut engineers, paid $10 to attend, then about four times the cost of a movie.
