The Intel trinity: how Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove built the world's most important company

572 Pages·2014·3.3 MB·English

by  Michael S. Malone

Contents
Introduction: Artifacts
Part I: The Fairchildren (1957–1968)
1. The Traitorous Eight
2. The Greatest Company That Never Was
3. Digital Diaspora
Part II: Start-Up (1968–1971)
4. The Ambivalent Recruit
5. Intelligent Electronics
6. Robert Noyce: The Preacher’s Son
7. The Demon of Grinnell
8. The Pig Thief
9. A Man on the Move
10. Gordon Moore: Dr. Precision
11. A Singular Start-Up
12. The Wild West
13. Bittersweet Memories
Part III: The Spirit of the Age (1972–1987)
14. Miracle in Miniature
15. The Inventor
16. A Sliver of History
17. Dealing Down
18. The Philosopher’s Chip
19. Product of the Century
Part IV: The Most Important Company in the World (1988–1999)
20. Crush
21. Silicon Valley Aristocracy
22. Public Affairs
23. Consumer Fantasies
24. A Thousand Fathers
25. The Knights of Moore’s Law
26. (Over) Ambitions
27. Beatification
28. The Heart of Andrew Grove
29. Mother and Child
30. Father and Child Reunion
31. Andy in Exile
32. Freedom Fighter
33. A New Life, a New Name
34. Bylined
35. Riding a Rocket
36. For the Cause
37. East of Eden
38. Turn at the Tiller
39. Eminence
40. Crash
41. Memory Loss
42. Andy Agonistes
43. Mentoring a Legend
44. The Man of the Hour
45. Juggernaut
46. Empyrean
47. The Swimmer
Part V: The Price of Success (2000–2014)
48. Family Matters
49. Inside Intel Inside
50. Wired World
51. Pentium
52. The Bug of All Bugs
53. The Endless Lawsuit
54. Mea Culpa
55. Bunny Hop
56. Running the Asylum
Part VI: Aftermath
57. The Full Weight of the Law
Epilogue: Roaring at the Night
Appendix: A Tutorial on Technology
A Note on Sources
Notes
Index
Photographic Insert
About the Author
Also by Michael S. Malone
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction: Artifacts
JANUARY 2013 —
I
t was a night for contradictions. After an unusual January day in which the
temperature had soared to nearly 70 degrees, the evening had just begun to cool
to its proper temperature when the first of the cars—Mercedes, BMWs,
chauffeured Lincoln Town Cars—began to pull up to the anxious platoon of
waiting valets.
The well-dressed men and women slowly climbed out of the cars with the
careful and unsure movements of the elderly—an unlikely sight in Silicon
Valley, home of the young, quick, and infinitely confident. And as these
venerable figures made their way into the entry hall, took their wineglasses from
the passing trays, peered at one another’s name tags, and grinned and embraced
in recognition, their sincere happiness seemed more like that of a Midwestern
high-school reunion than the nervous and wary bonhomie taking place around
them in the restaurants and bars of the Valley.
The venue for this party—the private screening of a new PBS American
Experience documentary titled Silicon Valley—was itself something of a
contradiction. Built on what had once been San Francisco Bay marshland
inhabited only by burrowing owls, hard by the long-forgotten site (symbolic for
what was to come) of a roller-coaster manufacturer, the curved glass-and-steel
building—looking like the offspring of an airport terminal and a multiplex
cinema—had originally been built as the corporate headquarters of high-flying
graphic computer maker Silicon Graphics Inc.
But in a vivid reminder of the old Valley rule that whenever a company
builds a fancy new headquarters you should short the stock, SGI had cratered—
and the building, not yet filled with desks and bodies, was abandoned. And there
it sat, a white elephant in the middle of a real-estate slump, until the least likely
of tenants appeared: the Computer History Museum.
This odd tenant had not been especially welcome upon its arrival in the
Valley in 1996. For the previous twenty years, it had been the Computer
Museum of Boston—a celebration of just the kind of mainframe-computing Big
Iron that Silicon Valley had been founded to defeat. But the vanquished
computer industry, like generations of other, human, outsiders, had come to
Silicon Valley to make a fresh start—and the Valley, as always, had allowed it to
earn its place. The big old computers were still there on exhibit, but largely
pushed to the back, supplanted by the genius of the local companies—Intel,
Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Google—that now ruled the digital world.
More important, though, than even the artifacts on display (because in high
tech even the hottest new inventions are quickly forgotten), the Computer
History Museum had found a new role in the Valley for speeches, reunions, and
honors celebrating the pioneers and inventors of the digital age. And now that
those founding figures, like the men and women gathered on this night, had
grown stooped and gray—some of them gone forever—the museum had found
its true purpose in preserving the collective memories and acquired wisdom of
the industry’s pioneers . . . preserving them until future generations needed them
once again.
Once, that date had seemed far off. Silicon Valley had always been about the
future, not the past, about what could be rather than what had been, no matter
how glorious. Nobody ever got rich and famous in high tech by looking over his
shoulder; rather, you built better telescopes to spot the Next Big Thing as it
appeared on the horizon. You had only to walk the exhibit area at the Computer
History Museum to see a middle-aged engineer excitedly describing some
machine he’d worked on three decades before to a young engineer, looking
bored and unimpressed. Out in the Valley, on any given Saturday, you could see
lines at local junior college recycling lots dumping off tons of “obsolete”
computers, printers, and other devices often little more than a couple years old.
Moore’s Law, the biennial doubling of computer chip performance that had
accelerated the pace of innovation and become the metronome of the modern
world, was named after the grandfatherly-looking man who at this moment was
making his way into the museum. Moore’s Law guaranteed that change would
be so central to modern life that there would be precious little time left for
nostalgia. When you are being chased by demons, your only chance of survival
is to keep racing forward as fast as you can; looking back can only scare you.
Worse, as Moore’s Law had been warning for a half century now, it wasn’t even
enough just to go fast. Rather, you had to go faster and faster, progressing at a
pace humanity had never before known, just to keep up.
That unimaginable pace, from living with numbers—subscribers, transistors,
bandwidth, processing speeds, mass storage—that had no precedent in human
experience, was now daily life in Silicon Valley and indeed in the entire digital
world. And nowhere was this pace more torturous and unforgiving than just
seven miles down the road at Intel Corporation, the home of the microprocessor
and Moore’s Law, the company pledged to the death to maintaining the flame of
the Law. The company upon which every enterprise in Silicon Valley—and
almost every human institution on the planet—now depended.
And yet despite all of these forces pushing Valley life forward, this evening
event represented something brand-new in the story of this restless community.
Suddenly, after more than fifty years of incessantly, unrelentingly being news,
Silicon Valley had finally and unexpectedly become history. It would now be
studied by schoolchildren and be the subject of college courses and endless
doctoral dissertations. All of that was occurring already around the world, but as
anecdotes and sidebars. Now it would join the main narrative of twentieth-and
twenty-first-century history.
And that was the biggest contradiction of all—because that official history,
certified by the most watched history program on America’s public television
network, had built its tale of Silicon Valley around the story of Intel—and in
particular, its charismatic cofounder, Robert Noyce—the company that was the
very embodiment of living in the future and indeed had chained itself to that
future. And now it would be the poster child of Silicon Valley’s past.
How would Intel, one of the most valuable companies in the world, builder of
the microprocessor engines that powered the global Internet economy, reconcile
its endless need to drive chip technology forward at the exponential pace of
Moore’s Law with this growing retrograde pull of its glorious past? There was
no obvious answer, but somehow it seemed that the search for a solution to this
conundrum of contradictions would begin at this overdue event on this unlikely
evening.

Perhaps tellingly, though almost every one of the two hundred people at the
premiere were in some way connected to the story of Intel Corporation, only the
handful of PR executives who were managing the event for PBS were current
Intel employees, people who worked every day in the world of social networks,
smartphones, and embedded controllers. Given that it was still early evening, it
could only be assumed that the rest of Intel’s 6,000 employees in the Bay Area
(of the 107,000 around the world) were still at the office, battling everything
from the encroachments of competitors to the endless Sisyphean challenge of
Moore’s Law. Even Intel’s CEO, Paul Otellini, who had over his forty years with
the company worked with just about everyone in the hall—and owed his career
to many of them—was missing, presumably in action.
Instead, almost everyone else in attendance belonged to an older, now
officially legendary, world of minicomputers, calculators, digital watches, and
most of all, personal computers. For them, the Internet Age and the dot-com
bubble represented the end of their careers, not the beginning—and Facebook
and Twitter were phenomena they read about in their retirement, the tools and
toys of their grandchildren.
But even if they were no longer in the game, they had the consolation of
knowing that, as the documentary was about to show, they had changed the
world. They were the business heroes of the second half of the twentieth century,
and their legacy was secure, unlike that of the current generation of Intel
employees, who labored for a company that had dangerously and
uncharacteristically misstepped with the arrival of mobile computing and was
now struggling to regain ground lost both to giant unforgiving competitors like
Samsung and to hot up-and-comers like ARM. For the modern Intel, unlike the
historic Intel being celebrated on the screen, the jury was still out.
It was these aging men and women who not only had built the most important
company of the age, but arguably had shaped the form of the modern world. It
had made many of them very rich—a quick mental audit of the gathering
suggested a total net worth of nearly $50 billion—and many sensed that the
process had now begun to make them immortal.
Two of the men now being escorted by their families into the museum were
already living legends. Both looked much older than anyone remembered them,
and that recognition drew muffled gasps from even their old friends and
workmates.
Gordon Moore, the giver of the great law, now spent most of his time in
Hawaii, making only occasional visits to his foundation in Palo Alto. He looked
comparatively healthy—but those who knew him well also knew that this was
only a recent positive turn. Scores of people from his past—from founding
investor Art Rock to old lieutenants like Ed Gelbach and Ted Hoff—made their
way over to shake Gordon’s hand, and with the gracious humility, like an old
Sunday school teacher’s, that had always characterized him, Moore greeted each
in turn.
Beside Moore stood a slightly smaller man, his face showing the effects of
Parkinson’s disease but radiating intensity out of proportion not just to his size
and health, but to anyone else in the hall. Andy Grove, the greatest and most
ferocious businessman of his generation, met each handshake—from old
compatriots like Les Vadász to old competitors like Federico Faggin—with the
same fiery look.
Together these two men, with the help or threat of everyone else in the hall,
had built Intel Corporation into the most innovative company the world had ever
seen. And then through an impossible gauntlet of challenges—including on
occasion their own misguided stubbornness—they had built Intel into the most
valuable manufacturing company in the world. And through Intel’s products and
commitment to Moore’s Law, they had made possible the consumer electronics
revolution that now defined the lives of three billion people, with millions more
joining every day. Humanity was now richer, healthier, smarter, and more
interconnected than ever before because of what they achieved. And now
humanity was beginning to recognize that fact.
In this story, they were the heroes—and everyone else had been a player, and
happy to have been a part of that story. And if there was pride in what they had
accomplished, it was bittersweet, because everyone knew that this was not only a
celebration, but perhaps a last gathering as well. Anyone who doubted that had
only look at the two elder statesmen at the center of this gathering. And so as
guests in turn shook hands with Moore and Grove, each understood that it might
be for the very last time. Tonight would be a celebration, but it would also be a
last gathering of the tribes who had built Silicon Valley. And so each fixed that
handshake in mind as a final memory.
Regis McKenna, the marketing guru who had led Intel into the big world and
helped to devise the most influential high-tech branding program of all time, had
been muttering about the flaws in the documentary, which he had already seen.
“It’s not bad,” he said, “but it suffers a little from being too . . . East Coast, if
you know what I mean. There’s a bit too much credit given to the government
for making all of this possible. There’s too many clips of rockets.”
Then, seeing Grove and Moore enter, he slipped away—to return a few
minutes later, grinning but with tears in his eyes. “When I got up to Andy, he
bowed and said, ‘Teacher.’ The last person who called me that was Steve Jobs.”1

Despite the bonhomie and nostalgia, there was also the unsettling sense at the