Noyce and Moore abandoned Fairchild as quickly as they’d left Shockley’s startup a decade earlier, and founded Intel, which stood for Integrated Electronics. In their vision, transistors would become the cheapest product ever produced, but the world would consume trillions and trillions of them. Humans would be empowered by semiconductors while becoming fundamentally dependent on them. Even as the world was being wired to the United States, America’s internal circuitry was changing. The industrial era was ending. Expertise in etching transistors into silicon would now shape the world’s
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