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.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Technology with tech Stuff from how stuff Works dot Com.
Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I am your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I am a senior writer with how stuff
Works dot Com. I say that every show, and yet
some people are still surprised to know there is a

(00:24):
how stuff Works dot Com. There is and explains how
stuff works, not just technology, but all sorts of things.
So if you've ever been curious how something works, check
out our website. Chances are we've got some information about it. Today,
we're going to do another one of my wonderful episodes
about the history of a big company in technology. And

(00:45):
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 episodes because I always learned something that
I didn't know before about companies that I'm really from.
You're with from a product standpoint, but maybe not so
much behind the scenes. That's certainly the case with today's topic. Intel. Now,

(01:09):
Intel is a major player in the computers industry, obviously
in 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

(01:35):
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 inside. 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 story behind

(01:57):
the company. Well, understand that we're gonna have to do
something that I'm infamous for doing, which is that we're
gonna 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, you need to go

(02:18):
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
lad there, you don't have as full and appreciation, At
least in my opinion, that's the case, certainly personally for me,

(02:41):
that's the case. So we're gonna 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 DISCUSSI and as well, because all

(03:01):
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 gonna look at some stories about people who

(03:24):
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 at least disturbing, if not worse. But

(03:47):
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 you listen to my episodes about
the history of electricity, you remember about the concept of resistance, right,

(04:12):
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 free freely. But
something with a very high resistance, like a very very
high resistance that's an insulator, it doesn't allow electrons to

(04:33):
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. So resistance is this

(04:54):
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 through nearly as easily. These are

(05:16):
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 just have to move it so it hits that

(05:37):
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 not large macro objects like marbles. And it's not
a perfect analogy, but it allows you to kind of

(06:00):
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 add in some of these impurities to

(06:26):
change it from being say pure silicon, to dope 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 there are other ways of changing
Like I mentioned with superconductors, that's temperature. So there are

(06:47):
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 semi conducting that I know of came
from Alessandro Volta. And again, if you listen to those
history of Electricity episodes, then you know that Volta was

(07:11):
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
semiconductors are or what was going on, largely because he
did not have a full understanding of what electricity was. Remember,
for for centuries people thought electricity was some form of fluid.

(07:35):
They hadn't 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 sulfides
electrical resistance would change at different temperatures. So he made
this observation. If he changed the temperature of silver sulfide,

(07:55):
the resistance would also change. Johan Hittorf, who was another
science has 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 about semiconductors
and the factors that would cause them to change their

(08:16):
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 of different electronic applications,

(08:39):
and often the signal that you generate may be 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. Uh that it was
certainly the case with telephone communication. In the early twentieth century,
a little company called A T and T was struggling

(09:01):
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 I want

(09:23):
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,
A T and D was really interested in innovating in

(09:44):
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 too,
and those patents were what allowed A. T and T
to maintain a strategic advantage over other potential competitors. But

(10:07):
patents expect they expire after a while, so once they expire,
that information isn't available for anyone to use without having
to pay a license. So the patent allows you to
see how how people are doing things, but it prevents
you from following that same example unless you license the

(10:27):
information from the patent holder. Well, once the patent expires,
it's free game. So A T 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 A T and T.
I did some episodes about the company not that long ago,
and they were very good at maintaining their advantage for

(10:52):
a really long time, even after they got broken up
by the United States government. Well, they 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.

(11:14):
These were 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 were delicate, they could burn out,

(11:37):
so you'd have to replace them fairly regularly. Uh. They
were also very 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's some things where people still love to use

(11:59):
vacuum tubes as their signal amplifier. People who use amplifiers
for musical instruments love, generally speaking, amplifiers that use vacuum tubes.
They those are valued very highly in the musical field,
but for something like long distance telephone calls, it was

(12:19):
seen as sort of a band aid to the problem.
And so the company A T 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,
and they wanted to find an alternative to vacuum tubes,
something that could boost a signal similar to the tubes,

(12:41):
but take up a fraction of the 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. In a way, Shockley would become partly responsible
for the foundation of Intel, but it wasn't because he
was a founder of Intel. He wasn't. He was not

(13:03):
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 so I had moved
his family to the United Kingdom. His mother was one

(13:25):
of the first women to graduate Stanford, and she held
degrees in mathematics and art. Now, apparently the Shockley family
was a group of curmudgeon lely folks. They were a
little grouchy from all accounts. Uh. They might have had
arrestibility as a family feature. His parents never seemed to

(13:47):
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 back in
nineteen and he majored in physics. He was apparently really

(14:10):
quite the prankster over at cal Tech, supposedly, as pranks
were the stuff of legend. I did not, however, look
into those for this episode. Maybe in the future one.
He pursued a doctorate at m I T in nineteen
thirty three, and then he became an apprentice to a
man named Philip Morse, and as a result he got

(14:31):
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. Uh. He was one of the people
who made an early design for a nuclear reactor. He
actually partnered with a guy named James Fisk to work

(14:52):
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 and little chunks, and you
could separate the chunks of uranium from each other using
some other material, and the purpose of that material would
be to slow down but not capture neutrons as they're

(15:13):
given off by the uranium, and by doing that allowing
the neutrons to hit other atoms of you two thirty
five and thus generate more neutrons as the YOUTO thirty
five would decay, and these new these neutrons would then
move out to again uh impact other you too thirty

(15:34):
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 two and considered highly
dangerous material. It turned out that the scientists who were
working on the Manhattan Project we're concentrating on essentially the

(15:57):
same thing that Fiskin and Shockley we're thinking about, except,
of course, Shockley 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
knowledge of each other because the US government was very
much concerned with keeping this stuff secret and safe from

(16:19):
potential enemies, so they didn't know anything about each other's
projects until after World War two had ended. Now, before
the war, Shockley had actually worked with a guy named
Walter Brittaine who together they were trying to create this
alternative to vacuum tube technology, a solid state alternative to

(16:40):
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.
But after the war, Shockley decided to try this again.
They brought on another theorist over to Bell Labs named
John Bardine now Bardein and Britain we're starting to work

(17:03):
together closely to try and create this alternative vacuum tubes.
And Shockley was the administrative leader for their team, but
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

(17:23):
or maybe some suggestions, and then he would head off
and work on his own some more so, he was
not actually part of the team that on December six,
ninety seven unveiled the first working transistor, a solid state
alternative to vacuum tube technology. In staid that was Britain

(17:44):
and Bardin 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
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

(18:08):
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
would be so bulky and hot. Uh So it really
did open up an enormous world of opportunity for really
everyone ultimately, but especially a T and T early on

(18:30):
now Shockley reportedly had a complicated reaction to the development
of this first transistor. On one hand, he was really
proud 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

(18:52):
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 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 am a feeling
that he felt a little upset that he did not

(19:12):
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
he was attending the American Physical Society convention, he came
up with an alternative to the point contact transistor called

(19:32):
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
same thing in a different form factor. So while he
was a little might have been a little bitter about

(19:52):
not being in on the team when they made this breakthrough,
he then immediately almost made an improvement to the designed
to make it more practical. A T and T made
a decision. It was kind of a political decision on
the back end, because you had Britain and Bardine, who
were the two guys who actually invented the transistor. But

(20:14):
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 A T.
Wanted to make sure they didn't step on any toes,
so they made a decision where they said that any
photo of the transistor that was to include the development
team would also have to have Shockley in it, sort

(20:37):
of as an uh 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 single photo of this transistor. So
it created a little bit of drama. And also Shockley

(21:01):
was reportedly difficult to work with at times. He had
a very um, forceful and somewhat brusque personality that people
didn't always enjoy being around. I'm dancing around it a lot,
but it's largely because I never met Shockley, so I
can't tell any firsthand information. I'm merely reporting what other

(21:24):
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 and too many
people's mouths if I can. Shockley, to his credit, always
tried to make sure that any stories that were about
this transistor indicated that Britaine and Bardine had been the
ones to make the breakthrough so he wasn't trying to

(21:46):
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 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

(22:09):
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 work on the transistor, along
with Britain and Bardin. 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

(22:32):
upset some people. Uh Shockley would end up completely alienating
himself from Britain and Bardein. Neither of them wanted to
work with him anymore. They felt felt that it was
a difficult working relationship. Um Bartein would and Britain would
actually both refuse to work with Shockley, and in nineteen

(22:54):
fifty three Shockley himself left Bell Labs, and first he
went back to cal Tech and he worked there for
a while, but he was looking for something more permanent,
and then he encountered a financier named Arnold Beckman, and
with Beckman's help and some funding, Shockley founded a new

(23:15):
company in California called the Shockley Semiconductor Company. They picked
a location near Stanford in northern California. Shockley thought that
that was an attractive spot, that the the the weather,
the climate there was really nice. The location was beautiful.
It was close to Stanford, so it would make it

(23:36):
easy to recruit students who are already at Stanford directly
out of school to come work at at Shockley Semiconductor.
So he thought of this as a y strategy. And
in fact, Shockley had a reputation for being able to
recognize brilliant scientists and engineers. Maybe he couldn't manage them

(23:57):
because of his personality, but he certainly could wrecking eys them,
and so he was really good at recruiting people who
would be very very strong performers in the semiconductor industry.
By the way, Shockley Semiconductor would become the second company
in Silicon Valley, the This is the early early days

(24:18):
of Silicon Valley, before you had countless companies there. And
Shockley Semiconductor 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 standard for for founding a company in
Silicon Valley. There were so many companies that were founded

(24:41):
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, not about California. Still same kind
of thing. Ing, uh, well, you got YOUWITTT. Packard that

(25:04):
paved the way back in ninety 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, hired on some brilliant people
to join his team. And two of those people, we're
Gordon Moore and Robert Noisce who would eventually go on

(25:26):
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 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

(25:47):
on both More and Noise. Gordon Moore grew up in
California and was really interested in science as a kid.
He earned his PhD and Chemistry and physics from cal Tech,
and he joined the Applied Physics labor tory at Johns
Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland. While he was there, his
chief responsibility was working on solid rocket propellants for the U. S. Navy,

(26:11):
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 Noyce grew
up in Iowa and was interested in physics and inventing
at an early age. He earned degrees in physics at

(26:34):
Grinnell College and at PhD in solid state physics from
m I T. He went to work for the phil
Co Corporation before meeting William Shockley, who recruited him to
join Chockley Semiconductor. But William Shockley's management style was rough.
People did not like working for him or with him,

(26:55):
and several members of his engineering team started to re
vent 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 Noise, tried to remove Shockley as the

(27:15):
head of Shockley Semiconductor. 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.
Shockley was absolutely livid about this. He was incredibly angry,
and he would thenceforth refer to those eight gentlemen as

(27:38):
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 those contra abutitions,

(28:00):
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 awful ideas and 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

(28:23):
African descent were naturally the intellectual inferiors of people of
European stock. So he garnered a lot of criticism for
these views, which he was not shy and sharing. Uh,
And it has in many ways diminished people's opinions of

(28:45):
shocklely 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

(29:07):
definitely fall into that terrible category. And it also illustrates
how a lot of people found William Shockley difficult to
be around. The Traders eight, however, had their own goal,
which was creating their own company. Now was that company Intel?
Well you'll find out after we take a quick break

(29:29):
to thank our sponsor. Okay, so no, the new company
was not Intel, not yet. The new company that these
eight men founded was called Fair Child Semiconductor. Now this
was an extension of an already existing company. That company

(29:53):
was fair Child Camera and Instrument Corporation. So this company
that produced camera as another instrument 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 people come up to the company and say, hey,

(30:14):
we just left Shockley Semiconductor. We're free to work with you.
We'd be willing to set up the fair Child Semiconductor company.
You give us the the capital to start the company,
will start producing products for fair Child. So it was
a great a great relationship. Fair Child got an enormous

(30:35):
jump ahead of the competition because these were some of
the leading thinkers and 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
fair Child Semiconductor story. I've actually talked about fair Child

(30:56):
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 fair Child Semiconductor
for eleven years, so it behooves us to learn a
little bit more about what they accomplished while they were there. Now,
one of the most important contributions Noise made at fair

(31:17):
Child was the development of the integrated circuit. These days,
integrated circuits are common, so it could be a little
challenging to understand 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 Instruments engineer named Jack Kilby who was

(31:41):
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 hicky that was connected by wires to other
do hicky's. In this circuit, the doo hikis dependent upon

(32:02):
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 circuits right there. Large There are
things that you could work with with your hands if
you needed to, and if you were to look at
early circuitry, each individual component would be its own thing.

(32:25):
Integrated circuits, as the name suggests, is a circuit in
which all the components are integrated together on a single
wafer of semiconductor material. Now, both Noise Over at Fairchild
and kill be Over at Texas Instruments developed this idea independently,
and both of them got credit for it. The Noise

(32:46):
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
semi conductor wafer. So this is sort of like designing
the wires the connect of different pieces together, but you

(33:06):
do it by evaporating this metallic material so that it
forms on the subway the semiconductor wafer in a very
specific pattern that allows the connections between the different components.
And it was a revolutionary technique at the time. As
for Gordon Moore, his most famous contribution during his time

(33:28):
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
was published in the journal Electronics in nineteen sixty five.

(33:51):
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
twenty four months computers double in processing power. So a

(34:14):
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, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
And so More was making an observation about the linear

(34:34):
relationship between time and the in this interpretation, processing power
of computers. But that's not entirely what More was actually
talking about back in nineteen six. Instead, More was observing
that as companies developed more advanced methods of designing, producing,
and mass manufacturing discrete components, namely transistors, onto integrated circuits,

(34:59):
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 more transistors on it, which would

(35:21):
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, More was pointing out that this trend
was supported by the economics of the semiconductor and integrated
circuit industries. This wasn't so much a commentary on technological progress,

(35:46):
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 role difference from the
way More's law tends to be communicated, but I think
it's an important distinction. There's profit to be made an innovation.

(36:12):
So Moreover, this classical approach of cramming more components onto
an integrated circuit would eventually become inaccurate as well. So
originally it was Gordon Moore saying here in nineteen sixty five,
we can fit twice as many transistors on a chip

(36:32):
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 size of the transistors and thus double the number
that can be on a sub semiconductor chip. Same thing
would hold true that this observation, as long as it

(36:54):
maintains that linear pathway, means that in two years will
fit twice as many transistors as to day. Two years more,
it will be twice as many as that, etcetera, etcetera.
That's not exactly the truth. Now we don't really see
the number of discrete components doubling every eighteen to twenty
four months. Uh. Today we're really talking about components that

(37:17):
are on the nanoscale. So a nanometer is one billionth
of a meter. That is a scale that is so
small you cannot view 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 nano scale. That's how tiny these components are

(37:39):
in microprocessors today. At that scale, quantum effects come into
play these weird quantum 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 a electrons be crazy yo. Essentially, electrons have an

(38:05):
area of potential where they could be 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, maybe if you
were to draw a circle, you could imagine that the
electron could be anywhere within that circle at any given moment.

(38:30):
Transistors involve electron gates 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 gets 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

(38:53):
is on the other 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
and different architectures. But it does mean that we're rapidly

(39:16):
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. Uh. However, it does mean that

(39:37):
we don't really talk about cramming more components onto a chip. Necessarily,
we talk about what it's 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 More's law these days. By the way,
you might wonder, if Moore's law is true and computers

(40:00):
are getting twice as fast every couple of years, why
is it that my computer has never seemed to get
twice as fast. Well, the problem with that is that
you have software bloat that often goes along with these
improvements in hardware. So if your software is demanding more
and more resources from a computer as it gets more advanced,

(40:20):
as you know, new types 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 gonna require more
assets than the software from today. So it's just constantly
treading water. You never really get to a point where

(40:43):
the computer really feels twice as fast as your old computer, uh,
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 fair Child. Robert
Noyce became the general manager of fair Child Semiconductor. Gordon

(41:04):
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, fair Child Camera and Instrument, which meant that
Noise and More and all the others still had to

(41:24):
answer to other people, people who didn't all have the
same priorities that they did. So one big sticking point
was that fair Child Camera and Instrument was taking some
of the profits from fair Child Semiconductor and using them
in areas outside the semiconductor industry. They were investing them
in other parts of the company. So to Noise and More,

(41:45):
it felt like fair Child 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 they became increasingly disenchanted with

(42:05):
the way things were running. So in July nine, Noise
and More both tendered their resignation from fair Child semi Conductor.
So they had already left Shockley semi Conductor to found
fair Child semi Conductor. Now they were going to leave
fair Child semi Conductor to found a third company. They
each put forth a quarter of a million dollars as

(42:29):
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 get that two and a half million. He's

(42:49):
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 and only was one page, very simple business proposal

(43:11):
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
new company. But why are they going to call it?

(43:32):
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

(43:53):
then went with the company name in 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.

(44:18):
So they took INT from integrated and l from Electronics
get Intel. They couldn't just adopt the name right away, however,
because there was another business called Intel Co. That had
the rights to it. So first Noise and More purchased
the rights to the name, and then they used Intel
and Intel was officially born. They located the company in

(44:39):
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 and

(45:02):
all lower case letters. You can still see that today,
But the original logo had the E and 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

(45:22):
bipolar memory chip called the three one oh one schlot 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 gets some
attention while it developed more innovative products, and then the
company made waves by launching the first metal oxide semiconductor

(45:46):
for static random access memory, also known as the eleven
oh one. Now, there are lots of different types of
computer memory. There's rob memory, or read only memory RAM,
or random access memory, CAN 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

(46:08):
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 and computer memory so it can
reference it very quickly. And I've talked a lot about

(46:29):
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

(46:51):
spreadsheet are called word lines. The intersection of bit lines
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

(47:14):
RAM from sequential memory. Sequential memory, as it sounds, is
stored in sequence. This would be like a tape, 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

(47:34):
section that you need in order to retrieve it. 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 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

(47:55):
start skimming through line by line to 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

(48:16):
actual science and technology behind memory, but that would take
up so much time. Now. For now, we're just gonna
skip over it and just say Intel's first products were
memory chips. But were they successful or find out about that.
We'll have to come back after a quick break to
thank our sponsor. Kind of successful. The eleven O one

(48:43):
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 Intel launched the eleven O three,
which was a dynamic RAM chip or d RAM chip,
with one kill a byte of memory, though some records
say it was one kill a bit, which is actually

(49:04):
a pretty big difference. Remember a bite 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

(49:26):
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 shows 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

(49:48):
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 and 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

(50:09):
of peach 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 in memory would eventually become

(50:29):
the industry standard, which, 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

(50:50):
a new technology that year called eraseable programmable read only
memory or e PROM or sometimes just i RAM 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

(51:13):
computer memory because once you 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

(51:34):
in this volatile computer memory is gone. 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

(51:55):
called the seventeen O two Because Intel had a habit
of numbering products, which made it a little less sexy
than other company products, but at least you can 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

(52:15):
would hold an initial public offering. So from its founding
in nineteen sixty eight through to nineteen seventy one, it
was a private company. It was supporting itself mainly through
sales and through more rounds of venture capital. But eventually
they were making enough of a success to go public.
It was only three years in so they held an

(52:35):
I p O and stocks were priced at twenty three
dollars and fifty cents per share, and the company raised
six and 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 start with an

(52:57):
I p O that only raised six point eight million.
When you see i p o s 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 nine So for one thing,
we got to adjust for inflation, Well we don't. I

(53:18):
already did it. The adjustment for inflation would be around
forty one million dollars in today's money, 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,

(53:42):
and that's it. So it was still a pretty enormous story.
I wouldn't turn down forty one million dollars, by the way,
So if anyone wants to make a investment of forty
one million dollars in Jonathan Strickland, I'm more than willing
to enter negotiations. So just throwing that out there. Intel

(54:07):
employees also in nineteen 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 until
owned the land. They owned the building itself. They were
no longer renting out space from other companies. So nineteen
seventy one had a move in day, which is kind

(54:28):
of cool. And also in nineteen seventy one, that was
when Intel got into the business most people know them for,
which would be micro processors. 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

(54:49):
to show for it. 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 boozy Com
one for one PF or Busy Calm, probably because it's
spelled like business, but it's busy Calm, not boozy com.

(55:12):
But I'm sure after using a printing calculator that was
one of the earliest ones ever made, you'd probably wanted
to be a boozy Com I'm guessing anyway, until 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

(55:35):
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

(55:56):
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

(56:19):
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

(56:44):
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,