TechStuff Classic: The Intel Story Part One

How did the co-founders of Intel go from being "traitors" to two of the early pioneers of Silicon Valley? We learn about Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there,
and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland.
I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the
Tech are you. So it's President's Day here in the
United States, and as such, it is a holiday in

(00:25):
our office, so our office is not open. But I
didn't want to leave you without an episode on a Monday,
and so we're actually dipping into our classics, which we
don't do as frequently these days. This is actually a
part one of a multi part podcast, but I thought
it's still really fascinating. It's telling the story of a
very important company and its origins. It is the Intel Story,

(00:49):
Part one. I hope you enjoy. Today we're going to
do another one of my wonderful episodes about the history
of a big company in technology. And I use the
word wonderful somewhat tongue in cheek, because it's weird to
toot one's own horn. But I genuinely enjoy researching these

(01:09):
episodes because I always learned something that I didn't know
before about companies that I'm really familiar with from a
product standpoint, but maybe not so much behind the scenes.
That's certainly the case with today's topic. Intel. Now, Intel
is a major player in the computer's industry, obviously in

(01:32):
the semiconductor and microprocessor industries, big big deal. But I
wanted to take this opportunity to kind of talk about
the history of the company, how it developed over time,
and sort of the contributions it has made to the
industry of electronics and computers. Right, So, chances are at

(01:52):
some point or another in your life, you've used a
device that had a little sticker on it that said
that there was Intel in side. The company is famous
for producing the chips that make our computers and electronics
so powerful. So they're famous for making the stuff that
makes our other stuff work. But what is the actual

(02:13):
story behind the company. Well, to understand that, we're gonna
have to do something that I'm infamous for doing, which
is that we're going to have to go roll the
clock back well before there ever was an Intel. Because
I really do think that to have a true understanding
of any subject, not just a company, but really anything,

(02:34):
you need to go back quite a bit and get
the foundation set before you start just spouting off facts.
I could tell you that Intel was founded in the
late nineteen sixties and pick up from there. But without
understanding the pathway that led there, you don't have as
full an appreciation. At least in my opinion, that's the case.

(02:55):
Certainly personally for me, that's the case. So we're going
to look at a couple of companies that preceded Intel
to understand why there's an Intel in the first place,
and we'll talk about the Traitorous Eight. There's treachery involved
in this story, and we'll also talk about Moore's Law.
That's going to play a big part in this discussion

(03:17):
as well, because all of this is wrapped up in
the birth of Intel, and it's a story of not
just technology, but of people. And as we all know,
people are complicated critters. We're capable of great and terrible things,
and sometimes things that are both great and terrible at
the same time. So today we're going to look at

(03:38):
some stories about people who made amazing contributions to us
in the form of engineering, advancing science, understanding the physics
of electronics at a deeper level that allowed us to
create incredible gadgets. But we'll also learn some not so
nice stuff, some things about people that were or at

(04:01):
least disturbing, if not worse. But much of our story
is going to revolve around semiconductors, so as a refresher,
a semiconductor is a class of material that has a
much lower resistance to the flow of electrical current in
one direction than it does in the other direction. If

(04:22):
you listen to my episodes about the history of electricity,
you remember about the concept of resistance, right, that's the
tendency of any given material to resist the flow of electrons. So,
if you have something that's a really good conductor, it
tends to have a very low resistance. It allows electrons
to move through fairly freely. But something with a very

(04:45):
high resistance, like a very very high resistance that's an insulator,
it doesn't allow electrons to pass through nearly as easily.
If you're able to take a conductor and you're able
to lower the temperature near to absolute zero, it ends
up becoming a superconductor, meaning that there's no resistance at all,
and it allows electrons to pass through without any resistance.

(05:08):
So resistance is this tendency to again resist the flow
of electrons. It turns out that in some materials this
is a variable where under one set of circumstances, electrons
will flow through very easily, and under a different set
of circumstances using that same material, electrons will not flow

(05:30):
through nearly as easily. These are what we call semiconductors,
because sometimes they conduct and sometimes they do not. It
can be useful to think of this as sort of
like an inclined plane or a slide. If you have
a marble and you let it roll down a slide,
it does so easily with very little effort, right. You

(05:53):
just have to move it so it hits that inclined
plane and gravity does the rest of the work. To
move the marble back up the slide, you have to
put forth some effort. You have to push the marble
up the slide, working against gravity to do so. Semiconductors
are kind of similar, except we're talking about electrons, not
large macro objects like marbles. And it's not a perfect analogy,

(06:15):
but it allows you to kind of understand what's going
on now. A semiconductor's tendency to allow or prevent electricity
from flowing through it can be altered in a few
different ways depending upon the material. So, for example, some
semiconductor material will change its resistance if you introduce some
impurities into it. This is called doping, where you strategically

(06:39):
add in some of these impurities to change it from
being say pure silicon, to doped silicon, and this would
allow for the transfer of electrons in one direction more easily.
Or you might be able to change the resistance of
a semiconductor by applying a magnetic field to it, or

(06:59):
there are other ways of changing Like I mentioned with superconductors,
that's temperature. So there are a lot of different factors
that can change the way a conductor conducts electricity, whether
it's with little resistance or with a great deal of resistance.
The first recorded use of the word semiconducting that I

(07:19):
know of came from Alessandro Volta. And again if you
listen to those history of Electricity episodes, then you know
that Volta was an eighteenth century philosopher and inventor who
created an early battery called the voltaic pile. But as
brilliant as Volta was, he did not actually lay down
any theories about what semi conductors are or what was

(07:41):
going on, largely because he did not have a full
understanding of what electricity was. Remember, for centuries people thought
electricity was some form of fluid. They didn't have a
full understanding of what it actually was. In the nineteenth century,
you had Michael Faraday. He was another scientist, and he
noticed that silver sulfide's electrical resistance would change at different temperatures.

(08:06):
So he made this observation. If he changed the temperature
of silver sulfide, the resistance would also change. Johann Hittorff,
who was another scientist, published a study about temperature dependence
of the electrical conductivity of certain materials, adding to more
knowledge about the nature of semiconductors. Several scientists formulated theories

(08:30):
about semiconductors and the factors that would cause them to
change their resistance to electrical flow, but it wouldn't be
until the mid twentieth century that someone figured out how
they could be used to solve what was becoming a
very tricky problem. Now, initially this problem was all about
signal amplification. Now, signals are very important in all sorts

(08:53):
of different electronic applications, and often the signal that you
generate maybe very weak and you need to amplify it.
You need to increase the amplitude of the signal in
order for you to do something useful with it that.
It was certainly the case with telephone communication. In the
early twentieth century. A little company called AT and T

(09:17):
was struggling with this because they were laying out a
coast to coast network of telephone lines. They were allowing
for transcontinental phone calls, but they needed to be able
to boost the signal that went along the telephone lines
so that the thing you heard on one end would
be intelligible, so that if I'm talking in Atlanta and

(09:40):
I want someone in San Francisco to hear me, the
signal remains strong throughout the entire journey from Atlanta to
San Francisco. So they needed to figure out a way
to amplify signals, and initially they were looking at using
vacuum tubes. Now AT and T was really interesting in

(10:00):
innovating in this space, largely because the company was starting
to worry about its patents, and it purchased several patents
from Alexander Graham Bell, who we attribute the creation of
the telephone to, and those patents were what allowed AT
and T to maintain a strategic advantage over other potential competitors.

(10:23):
But patents they expire after a while. So once they expire,
that information is then available for anyone to use without
having to pay a license. So the patent allows you
to see how people are doing things, but it prevents
you from following that same example unless you license the

(10:44):
information from the patent holder. Well, once a patent expires,
it's free game. So AT and T was looking at
these patents expiring and they said, well, we really need
to innovate in other spaces to maintain our competitive advantage.
And you've heard me probably talk about Aten He I
did some episodes about the company not that long ago,
and they were very good at maintaining their advantage for

(11:09):
a really long time, even after they got broken up
by the United States government. Well, the company was so
concerned about this they even brought Thomas Vale out of retirement,
that was their former president of the company, and they
wanted to really tackle this problem. And again, initially they
started to use vacuum tubes as signal amplifiers. These were

(11:32):
devices that were invented by a guy named Lee de Forest.
And one day I will have to do a full
episode about vacuum tube technology and exactly how it works.
But it's a little outside the scope of this episode. Now,
one thing you should know is vacuum tubes were not
a perfect technology. They had a lot of drawbacks. They

(11:52):
were delicate, they could burn out, so you'd have to
replace them fairly regularly. They were also very long, large
and bulky, so you could not have a small form
factor for whatever device you were using that had vacuum
tube amplifiers in it. And they generated a lot of heat,
which in some applications is problematic. Now, there are some

(12:14):
things where people still love to use vacuum tubes as
their signal amplifier. People who use amplifiers for musical instruments love,
generally speaking, amplifiers that use vacuum tubes. Those are valued
very highly in the musical field. But for something like

(12:34):
long distance telephone calls, it was seen as sort of
a band aid to the problem. And so the company
AT and T was really interested in figuring out an
alternative to these, and they tasked their research and development
ARM to try and come up with something. That ARM
was known as Bell Labs. They wanted to find an

(12:54):
alternative to vacuum tubes, something that could boost a signal
similar to the tubes, but take up a fraction of
size and put out very little heat comparatively speaking. The
team leader for this project at Bell Labs was a
guy named William Bill Shockley. Now, in a way, Shockley
would become partly responsible for the foundation of Intel, but

(13:16):
it wasn't because he was a founder of Intel. He wasn't.
He was not among the co founders of Intel. However,
you could argue that he was at least partly responsible
for Intel ever existing. Shockley was born in London, England,
but both his parents were American. His father was a
mining engineer who had contract work in the UK and

(13:38):
so had moved his family to the United Kingdom. His
mother was one of the first women to graduate Stanford,
and she held degrees in mathematics and art. Now, apparently
the Shackley family was a group of curmudgeonly folks. They
were a little grouchy. From all accounts, they might have

(13:59):
had arrested As a family feature. His parents never seemed
to be able to stay in one place for more
than a year, so they moved around a lot, and
Shockley himself would develop many of the same characteristics as
his parents, being a little difficult to be around, which
is probably a generous way of putting it now. Eventually,
Shockley attended the California Institute of Technology or cal TECH,

(14:22):
back in nineteen twenty eight, and he majored in physics.
He was apparently really quite the prankster over at cal Tech.
Supposedly his pranks were the stuff of legend. I did not, however,
look into those for this episode, maybe in a future one.
He pursued a doctorate at MIT in nineteen thirty three,

(14:42):
and then he became an apprentice to a man named
Philip Morse, and as a result he got a job
at Bell Labs. He gained a reputation as a brilliant
and innovative problem solver. Now this is a bit of
a tangent, but it's an example of his sense of innovation.
He was one of the people who made an early

(15:03):
design for a nuclear reactor. He actually partnered with a
guy named James Fisk to work on this. They were
trying to suss out how you could make a sustained
nuclear reaction, and Shockley's idea was that you could use
uranium in little chunks, and you could separate the chunks
of uranium from each other using some other material, and

(15:24):
the purpose of that material would be to slow down
but not capture neutrons as they're given off by the uranium,
and by doing that, allowing the neutrons to hit other
atoms of U two thirty five and thus generate more
neutrons as the U two thirty five would decay, and
these neutrons would then move out to again impact other

(15:50):
U two thirty five atoms and sustain the reaction, so
that you would just continuously have this release of radioactive energy. Now,
their work would end up being classified by the US government,
as this was during World War II and considered highly
dangerous material. It turned out that the scientists who were

(16:10):
working on the Manhattan Project were concentrating on essentially the
same thing that Fisk and Shockley were thinking about, except,
of course, Shocklei and Fisk were mostly interested in a
nuclear reactor, whereas the Manhattan Project was all about a
more uncontrolled nuclear reaction to create a bomb. But they
were all working on similar things. They didn't have any

(16:30):
knowledge of each other because the US government was very
much concerned with keeping this stuff secret and safe from
potential enemies, so they didn't know anything about each other's
projects until after World War two had ended. I interrupt
this classic episode about the Intel story in order for
us to take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Now,

(17:00):
before the war, Shockley had actually worked with a guy
named Walter Brittain who together they were trying to create
this alternative to vacuum tube technology, a solid state alternative
to vacuum tube amplifiers. But while they were working on it,
it didn't go anywhere. They couldn't create something that was
actually working. Then the war happened and their attentions were elsewhere.

(17:24):
But after the war, Shockley decided to try this again.
They brought on another theorist over to Bell Labs named
John Bardeen. Now Bardeen and Britain were starting to work
together closely to try and create this alternative vacuum tubes,
and Shockley was the administrative leader for their team, but

(17:46):
he was mostly working on his own on his own
little processes and inventions, So he would occasionally stop in
see what the two were working on, give some guidance
or maybe some suggestions, and then he would head off
often work on his own some more so, he was
not actually part of the team that, on December sixteenth,

(18:08):
nineteen forty seven, unveiled the first working transistor, a solid
state alternative to vacuum tube technology instead. That was Britain
and Bardeen who created that first point contact resist transistor,
and that would become the foundation for the electronics industry.
The transistor that is not the point contact version, just

(18:29):
the transistor in general. And I've done episodes about transistor,
so I'm not going to talk about it too much.
But the reason our electronics are so small is because
engineers developed the transistor. Otherwise we would still be dependent
upon vacuum tubes and that would really limit the types
of technology we could have at our disposal because they

(18:49):
would be so bulky and hot. So it really did
open up an enormous world of opportunity for really everyone
and ultimately, but especially at and t early on now
Shockley reportedly had a complicated reaction to the development of
this first transistor. On one hand, he was really proud

(19:13):
of his team. He was leading a team that had
made a major scientific and engineering breakthrough with the invention
of the transistor. But on the other end, he was
a little disappointed and frustrated that he was not directly
part of this team. And he also had his pride
hurt quite a bit because he had attempted to do

(19:34):
the same thing before World War Two but could never
get it to work. But these other two guys they
got it to work. So I have a feeling that
he felt a little upset that he did not come
up with the solution to this problem. Rather these other
two guys did. He didn't let that completely derail him. However,
while he was in a hotel room in Chicago where

(19:57):
he was attending the American Physical Society convention, he came
up with an alternative to the point contact transistor called
the sandwich transistor, which was easier to manufacture than the
point contact type, so it ended up immediately being a
replacement for this initial design of transistors. It did the

(20:18):
same thing in a different form factor. So while he
was a little might have been a little bitter about
not being in on the team when they made this breakthrough,
he then immediately almost made an improvement to that design
to make it more practical. At and T made a decision.
It was kind of a political decision on the back end,

(20:41):
because you had Britain and Bardeen, who were the two
guys who actually invented the transistor, but then you had Shockley,
who was the administrative lead of the team and who
had at least had some input, although not directly responsible
for the invention, and AT and T wanted to make
sure they didn't step on any toes, so they made
a decision where they say that any photo of the

(21:04):
transistor that was to include the development team would also
have to have Shockli in it, sort of as a
way of saying his contributions were important or instrumental for
the development of the transistor. Now, this also tended to
rub other people the wrong way, people who said he
didn't have nearly enough involvement to justify being in every

(21:26):
single photo of this transistor. So it created a little
bit of drama. And also Shockli was reportedly difficult to
work with at times. He had a very forceful and
somewhat brusque personality that people didn't always enjoy being around.

(21:48):
I'm dancing around it a lot, but it's largely because
I never met Shockli, so I can't tell any firsthand information.
I'm merely reporting what other people have said and even
third and fourth hand accounts of that sort of stuff.
So I like to be careful and not put too
many words in too many people's mouths. If I can. Shockley,

(22:08):
to his credit, always tried to make sure that any
stories that were about this transistor indicated that Britain and
Bardeen had been the ones to make the breakthrough. So
he wasn't trying to steal credit, he wasn't claiming it
for his own. He wanted to make sure that the
people responsible were credited with their work. But often Shockley
would be cited as the primary or sometimes sole inventor

(22:32):
of the transistor. That the narrative sort of became. He
had been working on it, he was derailed by World
War Two, came back and now it's a thing, and
he would point out that's an oversimplification of what had
happened in many different respects. And in nineteen fifty six
he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his

(22:53):
work on the transistor, along with Britain and Bardeen. But
the fact that he also got a Nobel Prize for
this when he wasn't directly involved with the invention of
the first working transistor again upset some people. Shockley would
end up completely alienating himself from Britain and Bardeen. Neither

(23:16):
of them wanted to work with him anymore. They felt
that it was a difficult working relationship. Bardeen and Britain
would actually both refuse to work with Shockley, and in
nineteen fifty three Shockley himself left Bell Labs and first
he went back to Caltech and he worked there for
a while, but he was looking for something more permanent,

(23:38):
and then he encountered a financier named Arnold Beckmann, and
with Beckmann's help and some funding, Shockley founded a new
company in California called the Shackley Semiconductor Company. They picked
a location near Stanford in northern California. Shockley thought that

(23:58):
that was an attractive spot, that the weather, the climate
there was really nice, the location was beautiful, it was
close to Stanford, so it would make it easy to
recruit students who were already at Stanford directly out of
school to come work at Shacklei Semiconductor. So he thought

(24:19):
of this as a y strategy. And in fact, Shacklei
had a reputation for being able to recognize brilliant scientists
and engineers. Maybe he couldn't manage them because of his personality,
but he certainly could recognize them, and so he was
really good at recruiting people who would be very very
strong performers in the semiconductor industry. By the way, SHACKLEI

(24:44):
semi Conductor would become the second company in Silicon Valley.
This is the early early days of Silicon Valley, before
you had countless companies there, and shackle semi Conductor was
the second such company in Silicon Valley. The first one
was Hewitt Packard, which was found in a Palo Alto
garage back in nineteen thirty nine and really set the

(25:07):
standard for founding a company in Silicon Valley. There were
so many companies that were founded in garages from that
point forward, some of them in Silicon Valley, some of
them in other places. So Apple Computers, for example, founded
in a garage in Palo Alto, California. Microsoft also founded
in a garage, but that time we're talking more about Washington,

(25:30):
not about California. Still same kind of thing. Well, you
got Hewitt Packard that paved the way back in nineteen
thirty nine, and then Shockley Semiconductor becoming the second company
in Silicon Valley. This was before it had even developed
that name. And Shockley, always good at recognizing strong talent,

(25:50):
hired on some brilliant people to join his team. And
two of those people were Gordon Moore and Robert Nois,
who would eventually go on to found Intel. But we're
not there yet. As long as I've talked about Shockley Semiconductor,
we haven't gotten to the point where Noise and More
go off to find Intel. We actually have some more

(26:12):
drama first with Shockley, and then we have another company
to talk about before we even get to Intel. But
first let's give some background on both Moore and Noise.
Gordon Moore grew up in California and was really interested
in science as a kid. He earned his PhD in
chemistry and physics from Caltech and he joined the Applied
Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland. While

(26:36):
he was there, his chief responsibility was working on solid
rocket propellants for the US Navy. But he felt that
his talents would be better suited for the private sector
and that that would be more challenging and profitable, so
he decided to relocate, moved back to California, and he
joined Shockley Semiconductor. Robert Nois grew up in Iowa and

(27:01):
was interested in physics and inventing at an early age.
He earned degrees in physics at Grinnell College and a
PhD in solid state physics from MIT. He went to
work for the phil Co Corporation before meeting William Shockley,
who recruited him to join Shockley Semiconductor. But William Shockley's
management style was rough. People did not like working for

(27:26):
him or with him, and several members of his engineering
team started to resent William Shockley, and in nineteen fifty seven,
just a year after most of them had joined the
company less than a year in some cases, a group
of eight engineers, including More and Neis, tried to remove

(27:47):
Shockley as the head of Shockley semi Conductor. This attempt failed.
They were not able to do that, so instead all
eight of them quit the company to go and found
their own company. Buckley was absolutely livid about this. He
was incredibly angry, and he would thenceforth refer to those

(28:09):
eight gentlemen as the traitorous eight, because they had betrayed
him by leaving his company after he had given them
all the opportunities. Now, William Shockley's legacy is at best complicated.
He made notable contributions in science and engineering, and without

(28:32):
those contributions we would not have the technology we have today,
we would probably be a few years behind where we
are right now. But he was also a complicated guy
who had awful ideas in philosophy and ideology. So, for example,
in the nineteen sixties, Shockley began to espouse his theory
of dysgenics, which included the racist notion that people of

(28:56):
African descent were naturally the intellectual inferiors of peaceeople of
European stock. So he garnered a lot of criticism for
these views, which he was not shy in sharing, and
it has in many ways diminished people's opinions of Shockley

(29:18):
and affected how we even talk about his contributions to
engineering and science, which were considerable, but his insistence that
dysgenics was a valid worldview was undeniably terrible. So that
when I said great and terrible things, this would definitely

(29:40):
fall into that terrible category. And it also illustrates how
a lot of people found William Shockley difficult to be around.
The traders ate, however, had their own goal, which was
creating their own company. Now was that company Intel? Well,
we'll find out after we take a quick break to

(30:02):
thank our sponsor. Okay, So No, the new company was
not Intel, not yet. The new company that these eight
men founded was called Fairchild Semiconductor. Now this was an

(30:23):
extension of an already existing company. That company was Fairchild
Camera and Instrument Corporation. So this company that produced cameras
and other instruments wanted to get into the burgeoning semiconductor
and transistor business, but they didn't really have the wherewithal
to do it within the company itself. So these eight

(30:45):
people come up to the company and say, hey, we
just left Shockley Semiconductor. We're free to work with you.
We'd be willing to set up the Fairchild Semiconductor Company.
You give us the capital to start the company, will
start producing products for Fairchild. So it was a great relationship.

(31:07):
Fairchild got an enormous jump ahead of the competition because
these were some of the leading thinkers in transistors and
semiconductors of the time. So it allowed Fairchild to get
a really big head start over other competitors. Now this
podcast is not the Fairchild Semiconductor story. I've actually talked

(31:30):
about Fairchild semi Conductor in a previous episode. But Noise
and more, who I promise are going to co found
Intel before this episode is over. They were at Fairchild
semi Conductor for eleven years, so it hoops us to
learn a little bit more about what they accomplished while
they were there. Now, one of the most important contributions

(31:50):
Noise made at Fairchild was the development of the integrated circuit.
These days, integrated circuits are common, so it can be
a little challenging to understand and how important this was,
how big a deal it was at the time. But
let's just use our imaginations for a little moment now.
Before Noise and also a Texas instrument's engineer named Jack

(32:13):
Kilby who was independently working on the same challenge. Circuits
were made of independent, discrete components that were attached to
each other with wires. So every element of a circuit
was its own little, separate do hickey that was connected
by wires to other do hickeys in the circuit. The

(32:34):
do hickeys dependent upon whatever you wanted the circuit to do,
whether they were resistors or they were some form of
electrical load like a light or something else, switches, that
sort of stuff. So these were Macro's circuits, right. They're large,
they are things that you could work with with your
hands if you needed to, and if you were to

(32:55):
look at early circuitry, each individual component would be its
own thing. Graded circuits, as the name suggests, is a
circuit in which all those components are integrated together on
a single wafer of semiconductor material. Now, both Noise over
at Fairchild and Kilby over at Texas Instruments developed this

(33:15):
idea independently, and both of them got credit for it.
The Noise came up with a means of creating the
connections between components on a circuit using a process called
the planar process. This involves evaporating lines of conductive material
directly onto the semiconductor wafer. So this is sort of

(33:36):
like designing the wires the connect of different pieces together,
but you do it by evaporating this metallic material so
that it forms on the subway the semiconductor wafer and
a very specific pattern that allows the connections between the
different components. And it was a revolutionary technique at the time.

(33:57):
As for Gordon Moore, his most famous miss contribution during
his time at Fairchild is what we now call Moore's law.
Now that's not to say it was his most important contribution,
but it's the one that most folks are aware of now.
This comes from an observation he made in a paper
that he titled Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits, which

(34:20):
was published in the journal Electronics in nineteen sixty five.
And it's probably not what you think it is. Moore's
law tends to be slightly misconstrued from the way that
Gordon Moore presented it in this paper. The common interpretation
today is that Moore's law means that every eighteen to

(34:43):
twenty four months computers double in processing power. So a
computer from two years ago would be half as powerful
as the computer you can buy today, and a computer
two years from now will be twice as powerful as
the computers you buy today. Computer from four years ago
would be half as powerful as one from two years ago,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so Moore was

(35:05):
making an observation about the linear relationship between time and
in this interpretation, processing power of computers. But that's not
entirely what Moore was actually talking about back in nineteen
sixty five. Instead, Moore was observing that as companies developed
more advanced methods of designing, producing, and mass manufacturing, discrete components,

(35:28):
namely transistors, onto integrated circuits. It followed this linear pathway.
So a company would make a breakthrough, it would invest
in the manufacturing process to develop a transistor or rather
smaller transistor, so that you could fit more of those
transistors on a single semiconductor chip, and then they would
make money by selling this more advanced semiconductor chip with

(35:53):
more transistors on it, which would give them more money
to put back into research and development and to make
even smaller transistors to make more powerful semiconductor chips and
then sell those in future circuits. So, in other words,
Moore was pointing out that this trend was supported by
the economics of the semiconductor and integrated circuit industries. This

(36:16):
wasn't so much a commentary on technological progress, but more
how the market supported the ability for engineers to research
and develop and design and produce these more powerful circuits.
It's a delicate and subtle difference from the way Moore's

(36:36):
law tends to be communicated, but I think it's an
important distinction. There's profit to be made in innovation. So moreover,
this classical approach of cramming more components onto an integrated
circuit would eventually become inaccurate as well. So originally it

(36:58):
was Gordon Moore saying, here, in nineteen sixty five, we
can fit twice as many transistors on a chip as
we could back in nineteen sixty three, and the reason
for that is that we have developed enough technology due
to the economic viability of these chips, to have the

(37:18):
size of the transistors and thus double the number that
can be on a semiconductor chip. Same thing would hold
true that this observation, as long as it maintains that
linear pathway, means that in two years will fit twice
as many transistors as today. Two years more, it'll be
twice as many as that, et cetera, et cetera. That's

(37:39):
not exactly the truth. Now we don't really see the
number of discrete components doubling every eighteen to twenty four months. Today,
we're really talking about components that are on the nanoscale.
So a nanometer is one billionth of a meter. That
is a scale that is so small you cannot view

(38:00):
it with an optical microscope. You would need a scanning
electron microscope or something along those lines. Optical microscopes aren't
going to allow you to see things on the nanoscale.
That's how tiny these components are. In microprocessors today. At
that scale, quantum effects come into play, these weird quantum

(38:21):
mechanics effects that mean your structures may not behave the
way you intended because of things like electron tunneling. Electron
tunneling is a fancy way of saying electrons be crazy yo. Essentially,
electrons have an area of potential where they could be

(38:41):
at any given moment around their respective atoms, or if
they're free floating electrons. It just means there's a zone
within which the electron might be at any point, like
it may be if you were to draw a circle,
you could imagine that the electron could be anywhere within
that circle at any given moment. Transistors involve electron gates

(39:07):
that are supposed to control the flow of electrons. Either
they allow them to pass through or do not allow
them to pass through. If the electron gates get so
thin that this zone where an electron can appear can
sometimes be on the other side of a closed gate.
It means that sometimes the electron is on the other

(39:27):
side of the closed gate, even though it didn't have
to go through the gate itself. It's as if the
electron has tunneled through the gate. This is a non
trivial problem when you're talking about transistors that have to
govern the movement of electrons. Now, engineers have figured out
ways around this, using different materials in different architectures, but

(39:48):
it does mean that we're rapidly approaching a point where
we can't just make stuff smaller. We're getting to a
fundamental limit of how small these components can be while
still running on the basics of computer logic and electricity
the way we have been running them in the past. However,

(40:10):
it does mean that we don't really talk about cramming
more components onto a chip. Necessarily, we talk about what
its output is. Can it put out twice as much
processing power as the ones that came eighteen months or
twenty four months ago. That's kind of how we frame
Moore's law these days. By the way, you might wonder,

(40:31):
if Moore's law is true and computers are getting twice
as fast every couple of years, why is it that
my computers never seem to get twice as fast. Well,
the problem with that is that you have software bloat
that often goes along with these improvements and hardware. So
if your software is demanding more and more resources from
a computer as it gets more advanced, as new types

(40:55):
of software come out, then all you're really doing is
just trying to stay ahead of the software bloat With
more powerful hardware. The software just takes more advantage of
the hardware that's there, because the software two years from
now is going to require more assets than the software
from today, So it's just constantly treading water. You never

(41:15):
really get to a point where the computer really feels
twice as fast as your old computer, unless you're just
running legacy software, in which case you might say, wow,
this is wicked fast, all right. Noise and More both
did very well at Fairchild. Robert Noise became the general

(41:35):
manager of Fairchild Semiconductor. Gordon Moore was the head of
research and development. But while they and the six others
whom Shockley named traders were the ones to found the company,
they didn't really control the company. It still fell under
the umbrella of the parent company, Fairchild Camera and Instrument
which meant that Noise and More and all the others

(41:57):
still had to answer to other people, people who didn't
all have the same priorities that they did. So one
big sticking point was that Fairchild Camera and Instrument was
taking some of the profits from Fairchild Semiconductor and using
them in areas outside the semiconductor industry. They were investing
them in other parts of the company. So to Noise

(42:19):
and More, it felt like Fairchild Camera and Instrument was
siphoning away some of the profits they were generating in
order to support other parts of their business, and they
didn't like that. So they felt the money should have
remained with the semiconductor industry, maybe invested back into the
company or into the employees. And it became increasingly disenchanted

(42:39):
with the way things were running. So in July nineteen
sixty eight, Noise and More both tendered their resignation from
Fairchild Semiconductor. So they had already left Shockley Semiconductor to
found Fairchild Semiconductor. Now they were going to leave Fairchild
semi Conductor to found a third company. They each put

(43:00):
fourth a quarter of a million dollars as an initial
investment in this new company, so together they had a
half million, and they raised another two and a half
million from various investors, who were primarily organized by a
businessman named Arthur Rock. And by the way, here's another
fun trivia note. Arthur Rock, the businessman who arranged to

(43:21):
get that two and a half million, He's the guy
who came up with the term venture capitalist. So if
you've ever heard venture capitalist, that was a term coined
by Arthur Rock, the guy who helped fund Intel. Now,
according to the founders, they presented Arthur Rock with a
business proposal that was a grand total of one pages long.

(43:41):
It only was one page, very simple business proposal that
essentially said they wanted to form a company that would
build integrated circuits. So Rock got on board. He managed
to secure the funding from various investors. He put in
ten thousand of his own dollars into the investment pool,
and he would eventually become the first chairman of the

(44:03):
new company. But why are they gonna call it? So
first they started thinking about potential names. They said, well,
maybe we can name it after ourselves. But then they
realized that they called it the More Noise Company, it
would sound like more noise and somehow being the head
of the More Noise Company didn't seem terribly attractive. They

(44:27):
then went with the company name n M Electronics. The
initials of their last names of Noise and More. But
this didn't last very long either, and within a month
or so they were changing their minds. They decided to
go with a totally different name, and they renamed their
new company Intel, which was inspired by the phrase integrated Electronics.

(44:51):
So they took INT from integrated and l from Electronics
to get Intel. They couldn't just adopt the name right away, however,
because there were as another business called Intelco. That had
the rights to it. So first Nois and Moore purchased
the rights to the name, and then they used Intel
and Intel was officially born. They located the company in

(45:13):
Santa Clara, California, and shortly after establishing Intel, they recruited
a guy named Andrew Grove from Fairchild Semiconductor. The three
of them would each serve as the chairman and chief
executive officer of Intel at some point over the next
three decades. A bit later, in nineteen sixty nine, they
released the company logo. The original logo had Intel in

(45:36):
all lowercase letters. You can still see that today, but
the original logo had the E in Intel at a
lower level than the rest of the letters, so it
was dropped down. The dropped down e logo is what
they called it now. At first, Intel's concentration was the
design and production of memory chips, which included a bipolar

(45:57):
memory chip called the three to one H one shlot Key.
Bipolar in this case doesn't have to do with any
sort of personality issue. It's just to talk about the
specific type of memory. This helped the company get some
attention while it developed more innovative products, and then the
company made waves by launching the first metal oxide semiconductor

(46:19):
for static random access memory, also known as the eleven
ZHO one. Now, there are lots of different types of
computer memory. There's ROM memory, or read only memory RAM,
or random access memory, cache memory, and tons more. As
the name suggests, the purpose of memory is to store
some sort of information so that the computer might refer

(46:42):
to it for any given application. Storing information and computer
memory simplifies things, speeds it up considerably because the computer
doesn't have to reference some other form of storage each
time it needs to reference a particular piece of information. Instead,
it stores that information in computer memory so it can
reference it very quickly. And I've talked a lot about

(47:02):
computer memory on this show, and I'm sure most of
you now have at least some understanding of it, but
I always like to take these opportunities to at least
take a kind of big picture view of the technology.
So think of RAM computer memory like a big spreadsheet table,
because essentially that's what it is. The columns of the
spreadsheet we would call bitlines, and the rows in the

(47:25):
spreadsheet are called word lines. The intersection of bitlines and
word lines is the address of a memory cell, and
computers can access information stored in RAM using this general address.
Right they know the address of the memory cell, they
can pull the information out of that cell right away.
This is really useful and it's pretty fast. This differentiates

(47:47):
RAM from sequential memory. Sequential memory, as it sounds, is
stored in sequence. This would be like a tape, a
videotape or a cassette tape where you have to actually
go at the beginning of the piece of data and
move down, go all the way through the data to
find the section that you need in order to retrieve it.

(48:11):
It's much more time consuming. If you want an analogy,
imagine that you have an enormous book with tons of
information written down in it, but it has no table
of contents. There are no page numbers. There are no
chapter headings, so if you wanted to find something specific
in the book, you would have to essentially start at
the beginning and start skimming through line by line to

(48:31):
try and find the information you wanted. But if you
had a similar book that was organized in chapters with
page numbers, section numbers, that sort of thing, and it
has an amazing index, you would be able to find
what you were looking for pretty quickly. That's what RAM
does with computers. And I might do a full episode
to talk about the actual science and technology behind memory,

(48:52):
but that would take up so much time, and for
now we're just going to skip over it and just
say Intel's first products were memory chips. But where they
sit successful. We'll find out about that. We'll have to
come back after a quick break to thank our sponsor.

(49:14):
EH kind of successful. The eleven oh one met with
limited success, and that was largely because the approach, while
it was innovative, was a little limited in that first
memory chip. In nineteen seventy, Intel launched the eleven oh three,
which was a dynamic RAM chip or d RAM chip
with one kill a byte of memory, though some records

(49:37):
say it was one kill a bit, which is actually
a pretty big difference. Remember, a byte is eight bits
of information, and a bit is your basic unit of information.
It's either a zero or a one. This was a
much more useful chip than the somewhat limited eleven oh one,
and it became a successful product for the company. One
of their first big customers for the eleven oh three

(50:01):
was Honeywell Incorporated. Honeywell is another huge name in computers.
I'll need to do a full episode about Honeywell in
the future. The company chose Intel's chips to replace the
core memory technology in Honeywell computer so this was an
enormous win for Intel. That same year, Intel purchased twenty

(50:23):
six acres of land on the corner of Coffin Road
and Central Expressway in Santa Clara. It had been a
peach orchard. So just think if they had gone with
that land first. If Intel had bought that land as
its first action, maybe they would have not named themselves Intel.
Maybe they would have given themselves some sort of peach

(50:45):
name because they bought a peach orchard. Maybe we would
have ended up with peach chips and apple products further
down the line, which would make a delicious Cobbler Cobbler
the company's innovations and memory would eventually become the industry standard, which,

(51:06):
as you can imagine, was great news for Intel. But
the innovation didn't stop there. Now we're going to end
this episode in nineteen seventy one, which was just a
couple of years after the company was founded. But that's
because there were some really big things that happened in
nineteen seventy one. First, Intel introduced a new technology that

(51:27):
year called erasable programmable read only memory or e PROM
or sometimes just EROM memory. This chip had an incredibly
useful feature. It could retain information in computer memory even
after you switched off the computer's power. So typically a
power cycle will wipe out computer memory because once you

(51:50):
remove power, nothing is going to the memory. It cannot
maintain its state and it returns to a base state.
So anything that was stored in memory is essentially wiped out.
The information that you have stored on the hard drive
or whatever other media you're using is still there, but
the stuff that was in this volatile computer memory is gone.

(52:12):
E PROM was a type of non volatile computer memory,
meaning that when you had power cut off, it would
maintain the state that it was in before power was removed,
thus it would remain within computer memory. This particular Intel
product was called the seventeen oh two because Intel had

(52:33):
a habit of numbering products, which made it a little
less sexy than other company products, but at least you
could figure out what each thing did based upon the
numbering system that Intel used. Also, in nineteen seventy one,
the company would make another big step. They would go public.
They would hold an initial public offering. So from its

(52:54):
founding in nineteen sixty eight through to nineteen seventy one,
it was a private company. It was supporting itself mainly
through through sales and through more rounds of venture capital.
But eventually they were making enough a success to go public.
It was only three years in so they held an
IPO and stocks for priced at twenty three dollars and

(53:14):
fifty cents per share, and the company raised six point
eight million dollars. Now, compared to some modern day electronics
companies and tech companies, six point eight million dollars seems laughable,
right you think of Intel, It's this enormous company and
it got to start with an IPO that only raised

(53:34):
six point eight million. When you see IPOs today for
other companies in the dozens and dozens or hundreds of
millions of dollars for evaluation. It's crazy to think about it.
But then also remember this was nineteen seventy one. So
for one thing, we got to adjust for inflation, well
we don't. I already did it. The adjustment for inflation

(53:57):
would be around forty one million dollars in today's month,
so still modest compared to some tech companies today, but
it was an enormous sum back then. Keep in mind
this is before the personal computer industry. Computers at this
point are still monstrously large things that research institutions and
some big companies have, and that's it. So it was

(54:20):
still a pretty enormous story. I wouldn't turn down forty
one million dollars, by the way, So if anyone wants
to make an investment of forty one million dollars in
Jonathan Strickland, I'm more than willing to enter negotiations. So
just throwing that out there. Intel employees also in nineteen

(54:44):
seventy one got to move into their new headquarters building,
which had been constructed on that land they had purchased earlier.
They owned this building. Intel owned the land, they owned
the building itself. They were no longer renting out space
from other companies, so nineteen seventy one had to move
in day, which is kind of cool. And also in

(55:05):
nineteen seventy one, that was when Intel got into the
business most people know them for, which would be microprocessors.
Now that project would actually date all the way back
to the founding of Intel or shortly thereafter. They started
the project in nineteen sixty nine. It wasn't until nineteen
seventy one that they had something to show for it.

(55:25):
But in nineteen sixty nine, another company called the Nipon
Calculating Machine Corporation came to Intel and said, we want
you to design twelve custom chips for our printing calculator,
which would be the Boozycom one four one PF or busycom,
probably because it's spelled like business, but it's busycom, not boozycom.

(55:47):
But I'm sure after using a printing calculator that was
one of the earliest ones ever made, you'd probably want
it to be a Boozycom, I'm guessing. Anyway, Intel engineers
took a look at this proposal and they countered. They said,
we could actually make what you want, but with four
custom chips instead of twelve. One of those custom chips

(56:10):
would be memory, one of them would be read only memory,
that sort of thing, but one of them would be
a programmable chip that could be used for all sorts
of different stuff, and Nipon agreed to this. Well, this
was an innovative idea to have this programmable chip as
opposed to something that was made from the beginning for

(56:31):
a very specific application. To have a programmable chip would
open up incredible opportunities further down the line, probably beyond
what Intel had anticipated. So through this project, Intel was
able to create the four zero zero four chip. This
was a central processing unit or CPU. Intel purchased the

(56:55):
rights from Nipon to market this chip separately from those
calculating machines, because if they hadn't, then Nipon would have
had the exclusivity to that technology for their calculating machines,
and then Intel would have missed out on a tremendous opportunity.
So they purchased the rights and the four zero zero
four processor was born. Electronic News heralded this event with

(57:19):
a headline that read, announcing a new era in integrated electronics,
and that's exactly what it was. The ability to create
a programmable central processing unit was a non trivial contribution
to the advancement of electronics and computer science. I hope

(57:42):
you enjoyed this episode about the Intel story, and I
hope you're all well, and I'll talk to you again
really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more
podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or

(58:03):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.