Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

by Chris Miller

In 1966, Burroughs, a computer firm, ordered 20 million chips from Fairchild—more than twenty times what the Apollo program consumed. By 1968, the computer industry was buying as many chips as the military. Fairchild chips served 80 percent of this computer market. Bob Noyce’s price cuts had paid off, opening a new market for civilian computers that would drive chip sales for decades to come. Moore later argued that Noyce’s price cuts were as big an innovation as the technology inside Fairchild’s integrated circuits. By the end of the 1960s, after a decade of development, Apollo 11 was finally ready to use its Fairchild-powered guidance computer to carry the first human to the moon. The semiconductor engineers in California’s Santa Clara Valley had benefitted immensely from the space race, which provided a crucial early customer. Yet by the time of the first lunar landing, Silicon Valley’s engineers had become far less dependent on defense and space contracts. Now they were focused on more earthly concerns. The chip market was booming. Fairchild’s success had already inspired several top employees to defect to competing chipmakers. Venture capital funding was pouring into startups that focused not on rockets but on corporate computers.