Word: intel
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...been easy. A history of the semiconductor business reads like a chapter of the Iliad: Unisem, dead of obsolescence; Advanced Memory Systems, killed by management; Mostek, slaughtered in a Japanese RAM invasion. Intel has endured crippling chip recessions, one Federal Trade Commission probe and a nasty public flogging over its flawed Pentium chips in 1994. Now the prospect of cheaper computers using cheaper chips, not to mention the threat of economic troubles in Asia, looms. But no firm does more reliable (or profitable) work in the tiny molecular spaces that Intel has colonized. It is the essential firm...
...grooving and recall the time Eva snapped her ankle on their shag carpet as the two danced to the sound track of Hair). The dance step is typical: Grove is a passionate, if disjointed man. He is a famously tough manager who, late at night, can still fill Intel's offices with a rolling laugh. He is a man who lost most of his hearing when he was young, but who soldiered through the toughest science classes flawlessly by lip reading and compulsive study. (His hearing would later be restored after five reconstructive operations over 20 years.) And though Grove...
...answer, of course, turned out to be what gave Silicon Valley its name. Gordon Moore (who ran Fairchild's research arm and later became Grove's mentor as CEO of Intel) believed you could store those charges with an integrated circuit made by sandwiching metal oxide and silicon into an electrical circuit called an MOS transistor. Unlike trickier semiconductors, silicon is both a wonderful conductor of electrical charges and a nearly bottomless sink for heat, meaning it doesn't melt down as you push electrons under its surface at nearly light speed. Because it is made from refined sand, silicon...
...understand the semi business, and science was being replaced by politics. Noyce phoned Arthur Rock, now the eminence grise of Silicon Valley investing, and told him that he and Moore wanted to start their own semiconductor company. Fairchild, he said, was finished. Rock (who holds nearly $500 million of Intel stock today) raised the money nearly instantly. Moore told Grove of the plan one day when they were at a conference in Boulder, Colo. The decision to join his bosses was made, Grove says, "almost instantly." Someone suggested the name Integrated Electronics, which was shrunk instantly to Intel...
...Intel did not enjoy an uninterrupted march to greatness. The problem wasn't any lack of candlepower--Noyce, Grove and Moore were a dream team. The problem was the business itself. It kept changing. Just as Intel's leaders decided the future was in, say, selling dynamic RAM (a kind of short-term computer memory), messages started trickling back that sales were tanking, customers were evaporating and, ahem, top management had better pick a new strategy. It was a miserable way to run a company: desperately leaping into lifeboats, always at the last possible moment. One night Grove dreamed...