"Robert Noyce: The Man Behind the Microchip" - Leslie...

MALE SPEAKER: Thanks for coming today.
This is part of the Authors at Google series.
I'm happy to introduce Leslie Berlin.
She's the author of The Man Behind the Microchip, which is
the book that you all can see at the chairs.
I think this talk's going to be really relevant to Google.
And also, I'm sure some of you will have personal careers and
histories that interact pretty closely with her work.
Just to give you a quick background, she has a PhD in
history from Stanford and she's currently working as the
project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives, which
is part of the Stanford University Department of
Special Collections.
She also is a visiting scholar and she's working on the
history and philosophy of science and
technology at Stanford.
She will follow her talk with a Q&A, so feel free to share
or ask any questions you might have. I'm sure she'll be happy
to answer them.
So I will turn it over to Leslie Berlin.

LESLIE BERLIN: Thanks very much and thanks for having me.
I'll try to talk loudly and hope you can hear me.
I'm really excited to have this chance to talk to you
about Bob Noyce and about my book The
Man Behind the Microchip.
When Noyce was alive, he was called the Thomas Edison and
the Henry Ford of Silicon Valley.
Thomas Edison for his invention of the integrated
circuit, which lies at the heart of modern electronics.
And he was called Henry Ford because he was one of the
founders of two different companies.
The first was Fairchild Semiconductor, which was the
first successful silicon company in Silicon Valley.
And the second was Intel, which is today, the largest
microchip company in the world.
On top of this, Bob Noyce was a daredevil.
He had a patch on his ski jacket that said, "No guts, no
glory." And this was absolutely a fitting motto for
this guy who piloted his own jets.
One time just took one threw a baby thunderhead cloud just to
see what that was like.
He was the kind of guy who loved to have helicopters drop
him at the top of mountaintops, so he could ski
his way down with a transponder clipped to his
jacket in case he got lost. And it was this combination of
risk-taking and inventiveness and business success that
really made Noyce seem the embodiment of Silicon Valley
and high technology.
But in the years since his death in 1990, Noyce's name
has really faded from people's memories.
I'm hoping that my book will do something to reverse that.
Because I've studied the history of Silicon Valley for
about 10 years at this point, and the more I've studied, the
more I've become convinced that Bob Noyce is just too
important to be forgotten.
And the person who reminded me of this, interestingly enough,
was actually Steve Jobs.
He said to me, "You cannot understand what is happening
today without understanding what came before." And Bob
Noyce is just an essential part of what came before.
So in about the next half hour or so, I'm going to just share
with you some of my favorite scenes from the book.
This isn't comprehensive.
I mean, you can see in front of you.
It's a bit of a tome, 300 pages and then
100 pages of notes.
These are really just some of my favorite pictures and
favorite stories.
So here we go.
So this is Bob Noyce as a baby.
He was born in December of 1927 in Burlington, Iowa.
And he's seated between his two brothers.
That's Don, his brother on the left, and Gaylord, his brother
on the right.
There's a fourth brother who obviously isn't shown.
You can see that the little boy's hands
are clasped in prayer.
And my guess is that their mother Harriet
made them do that.
She was this dynamic, wonderful woman who had always
wanted to be a missionary.
And she had this extremely strong personality.
She would have made an excellent missionary.
Very articulate, very devout.
And her father and her grandfather had both been
congregationalist ministers.
And then she went and married another congregationalist
minister, who is the father of these boys.
And just to give you a sense of the family that these kids
were born into, this family's Midwestern roots go way back.
The mom was from Chicago, the dad was from Nebraska.
Noyce lived in Iowa until he graduated from college.
And on both sides of the family, all of the adults had
been either ministers, teachers, or both.
And if you look at these three boys, two of them
followed the pattern.
Don, on the left, ended up becoming a professor of
chemistry at Cal Berkeley.
He was chair of the department for quite a while.
And his brother, Gaylord, on the right, became a
congregationalist minister, taught at Yale Divinity
School, went on the freedom rides, was friends with Martin
Luther King, Jr. It's a very accomplished family.
In particularly in these two fields.
Noyce always said that he fell into business by accident.
He wasn't really quite sure how it happened.
And this family too, had very, very high expectations of
their children.
Both of the parents had gone to college.
But more incredibly to me, all four of the grandparents.
At a time when 2% of the population had college
degrees, all four of these boys' grandparents, who were
Midwestern people from farm towns, not East Coast elite,
all of them had gone to college.
And the parents really tried to encourage inventiveness and
creativity in these boys.
They would do things like deliberately leave an
encyclopedia, a set of encyclopedias on a low shelf,
hoping that the boys would get a chance to read them.
I was thinking thanks to Google, not too many people
are going to have encyclopedias in their houses
anymore to do that.
But that encyclopedia really came into play about 12 years
later when the boys decided to build a glider.
This picture was taken in the summer of 1940
in Grinnell, Iowa.
This is Bob.
He's sitting on your left.
And that's his brother, Gaylord, with his arm raised.
Bob is 12, Gaylord is 14.
They're sitting with a glider that they built.
And to give you a sense of scale, the wingspan on this
glider was about 18 feet.
It was something that they built completely on their own.
They didn't have any blueprints.
They didn't have any help from grownups.
They didn't have any learn to build a glider summer camps or
anything like that happening.
They went strictly from their own experience building model
airplanes and from a picture that they saw in this
encyclopedia set.
They figured, if we can build little airplanes, we can build
big airplanes.
Now this plane was absolutely the highlight of the summer
for these Noyce brothers.
But also, for as near as I can tell, anyone who lived in the
town of Grinnell, Iowa, at the time they were growing up.
When I went to Grinnell to do some research, people would
just come out of the woodwork telling me just these
incredible stories about the glider.
About 5% of which turned out to be true.
But there were 17 kids on the block and the Noyce's managed
to help to marshal their talents in the
service of this glider.
So you had the boy whose father
owned a furniture store.
He had rugs come on these long spindles.
And the boy talked his dad into giving them the spindles,
and that's what made the frame of the plane.
Of course, the one girl on the block was the person assigned
to sew the cheesecloth that they stretched over the wings.
And then the boy on the block who was 16 years old, newly
possessed of his driver's license, was asked to tie this
glider to the back of his car and takeoff down the street to
see if they could get some air and pull it
behind like a kite.
Which they actually managed to do.
But to Noyce, the real mark of success would be if he could,
as he put it, jump off the roof of a barn and live.
So that's actually what he did.
He climbed up on the roof of this barn that you see here,
had somebody hand him the glider.
He took a deep breath and ran right off the edge of the roof
into the unknown.
And he landed without crashing and considered it absolutely a
great success.

Now, if I were a fiction writer, I would have made up
this story about the glider because it foreshadows so much
of what made Bob Noyce a successful
leader in the tech field.
First, you have here his real ability to tinker.
He could build anything with his hands.
He had immediate credibility with people because he was the
sort of guy who would blow his own glass if he needed to have
it for use in the lab.
Secondly, you see his ability to round up a team and have
each person contribute his or her own special talent to
making a project go.
And third, from the scale of this project, you can see that
Bob Noyce was a person with absolutely no sense of limits.
He was the kind of guy who really believed that if you
wanted to fly you needed to start running off of a rooftop
and not stop when you got to the edge.
This made him a fantastic leader because he never had
any sense that there was anything that you shouldn't be
able to do.
And he would manage to inspire people to
join him in that effort.
So now we're going to go to a black slide.
It has no deep significance.
It's just a transitional slide.
So imagine we're
fast-forwarding about 17 years.
Noyce grows up.
He goes to college at Grinnell College where he gets a double
major in math and physics.
Goes on gets a PhD at MIT in physical electronics, which
was about as close as you could get to semiconductor
physics at the time.
He gets married.
He goes and works for a year in Philadelphia at Philco.
And then he gets a call from a man named William Shockley
asking him to come here to this area, the San Francisco
Bay Area, to work.
Noyce said getting a call from William Shockley was like
picking up the phone and talking to God.
Shockley was absolutely the most important guy in
semiconductors.
He was one of three inventors of the transistor and he had
decided to set off and start his own company to build
transistors.
He built around him an absolute dream team of
researchers from all over the United States.
And the effort he went to to find these people is
absolutely monumental.
I mean, he visited all these college campuses, called
people, went to conferences, really trying to find what he
called "hot minds" in semiconductor research.
So Noyce was one of these "hot minds." And Shockley had a
real interest in psychological testing.
So in order to ensure that his team was not only brilliant,
but able to work together well, he subjected them all to
psychological tests.
With Rorschach tests, these sorts of things.
And you know, it actually worked.
The team worked together beautifully.
But Shockley's one oversight was that he did not have them
tested for psychological compatibility with him.
And that actually turned out to be quite a problem.
William Shockley was a micromanager down to the level
of specifying the kind of screws that he wanted used in
certain pieces of equipment.
And even more upsetting to the guys who'd come to work on
transistors with the inventor of the transistor, he decided
he really didn't care about building transistors.
He wanted to build something called a four layer diode,
which was a kind of cool idea, but there wasn't really a
market for it.
And so in September of 1957, a group of seven guys decided
that they were going to leave and start their own company.
And they talked Noyce into joining them.
And so on the appointed day, they climb into two of their
wives' station wagons, just squeezed in shoulder to
shoulder, and make the drive up the coast--
up the peninsula to San Francisco, where they are
slated to meet with two bankers in the Redwood Room of
the Clift Hotel.
A very, very swanky place at the time.
Now waiting there for them are these two bankers.
One's name is Bud Coyle, and with him too is his junior
associate, a guy named Arthur Rock, who I'm sure many of you
know as the venture capitalist behind Intel, behind Apple.
At this point, he was just a young pup.
So they talk for a while.
They decide, yeah, we think we can probably
start a company together.
It turned out to be much harder than
they had ever imagined.
They went to something like 30 different companies trying to
get backing.
No one wanted to take a chance on this group of
inexperienced guys.

Once they'd made their decision, Bud Coyle pulled out
of his briefcase 10 crisp $1 bills and he said, "Each of us
should sign every one.
These bills will be our contracts with each other."
And looking at this bill ought to give you a real sense of
what I'm talking about when I say William Shockley assembled
a dream team.
If you start in the upper right-hand corner, that's
Gordon Moore's signature recruited by Shockley.
Underneath him is Jean Hoerni who
invented the planar process.
Under him is Art Rock who we just talked about.
Coming to the left that's Eugene Kleiner of Kleiner
Perkins on the bottom left.
Above him is Noyce.
And then above Noyce are Jay Last, Sheldon Roberts, Julius
Blank and Vic Grinich, who were four key components to
the whole effort to bring the integrated circuit to life.
And then you have Bud Coyle's signature there.
So really, I mean this was a remarkable group of people.
And to me, as a historian, this was a
remarkable thing to find.
And the reason that I wanted to show it to you also is that
no one had ever seen this before--
I published the picture in my book--
other than the 10 guys whose names are on it.
And the way I found it-- this is the serendipity of
historical research--
was I was interviewing one of these founders.
I walked down his hallway following him to some room and
on the well I noticed a dollar bill.
And I thought to myself, I didn't know this guy started a
restaurant.
Which was really the only time I've ever seen a framed dollar
bill in my life.

I asked him about it.
He said he told me the story that I just told you.
And I confirmed this story with several
of the other founders.
All of whom had told me stories of starting Fairchild
Semiconductor, none of which mentioned this dollar bill.
They all said, oh yeah, yeah, my dollar bill.
I've got it in my-- you know, I mean, just places that just
makes you sick as a historian.
Oh, I've got it waded up in a corner somewhere, in my bill
fold, whatever.
And while they were so casual about this-- they weren't
hiding anything, they just didn't think it was very
interesting.
I was having heart palpitations.
Because if Fairchild Semiconductor is the company
that put the silicon in Silicon Valley, this is like
finding the Magna Carta of Silicon Valley hanging on the
wall of someone's house in Portland, Oregon.
So for me, it was just a very exciting thing to find.
And as an aside, I just wanted to tell you that this
nonchalance that these guys expressed towards their own
history, is very common among technologists who spend their
lives focused on the future.
And part of what I'm doing now at Stanford is trying to
recapture some of the documents from the founding
years of Silicon Valley that are just moldering away.
Or else they've been destroyed.
I'm happy to talk with you about that during Q&A if
that's something you're interested in.
This is what the guys looked like at the time that they
started the company.
I think two of them were over 30, but barely.
This is Noyce with his arm thrust over the chair front
and center, as was always the case with Bob Noyce.
Directly across the umbrella stick from him is Eugene
Kleiner of Kleiner Perkins.
And then to Jean's left-- your right--
is Gordon Moore.
I wanted to show you this picture in part because I
wanted to point out the umbrella, which
sounds sort of funny.
It was very, very hard to get people to move to the San
Francisco Bay Area in the late 1950s to work
for a high tech company.
This place was known for its orchards.
It was not known for high tech.
And these guys were only known as the crazy people who
decided that they were too good to work for William
Shockley, who then went and won the
Nobel Prize for physics.
They were considered rebels in a very negative way.
They were warned that they would never work in this town
again because they had left someone's job.
They'd left set jobs to go and start their own companies.
So these guys pulled out all the stops to try to get people
to come here.
One thing that they made a big deal about was the weather.
And this, with the sunshine and the umbrella was actually
their Christmas card, which they sent to people on the
East Coast with great glee, trying to show what you could
do if you would come to California.

They talked about the great, clean air here, how good the
schools are.
And my personal favorite, which when I read about with
Bob Noyce just cracked me up.
He had been living in the heart of Philadelphia.
When he wanted to move here, his wife didn't.
But the way that he convinced her to come was that, you
know, they could afford to buy a house in the San
Francisco Bay Area.
And in the heart of Philadelphia, they could just
afford an apartment.
So the low cost of living was another really big sales
points in the late 1950s.
Noyce's first job at Fairchild Semiconductor was heading R&D.
This is an incredibly intellectually
fertile time in his life.
In the first 18 months that he was at Fairchild, he filed for
7 patents that he received.
And 7 of his 17 came from this one window of time.
He was just sort of on fire intellectually.
The key one is this one, which is for what we would today
call the integrated circuit.
Now, usually when I'm not talking to tech audiences,
I'll sort of go in and explain how any electronic device with
an on-off switch, pretty much at this point runs on
integrated circuit technology.
Cellphones, the sort of thing.
And even things that people don't think about, like their
cars have just an incredible number of these circuits.
I mean, on the order of millions inside of their cars
helping to run these things.
At the same time that Noyce was coming up with his ideas,
Jack Kilby, in Texas working for Texas Instruments,
independently came up with his own set of ideas.
They are considered co-inventors of
the integrated circuit.
Now by the time this patent was filed, Noyce was no longer
working in the lab.
Essentially what happened was right after he sketched out
his ideas for the integrated circuit, a general manager,
whom the group of eight had hired to run the company for
them, did unto them what they had done and to Shockley.
And he up and left and started his own semiconductor company.
The other seven lobbied hard for Noyce to
become general manager.
He really did not want this job.
He was trained as a lab scientist. He was on an
intellectual role.
He knew nothing--
I mean nothing--
about business.
And he agreed to take the job for six months.
During which time he said that he was very happy to discover
that people would do what he said not because they liked
him, but because they had to.
And this, to him, was just sort of a great thing.
And he decided to go ahead and stay as general manager.
He managed to teach himself quite a bit.
By 10 years after Fairchild Semiconductor was founded, the
company had 11,000 employees and $12 million in profits.
In a lot of ways, it was the Google of its time.
It was in 1967, the fastest growing stock on Wall Street.
There were sort of frenzied people trying to get in on it.
And all of this happened under Noyce's leadership.
Now what happened though, was Fairchild got very, very big.
Noyce was from a small town.
Noyce always said that he was not able to manage large
companies well.
Which is true.
But he learned it by not managing Fairchild
Semiconductor very well when his second in command, Charlie
Spork, left in 1967.
The company's profits actually dropped 96% in one year, which
was a little bit of a problem.
Also, the company had been acquired and Noyce felt very
much like he wasn't being given the kind of autonomy and
authority he needed to run it the way he wanted to.
There was particular friction over stock options.
The company that had acquired Fairchild Semiconductor was
called Fairchild Camera and Instrument.
It was very steeped in East Coast tradition.
Sherman Fairchild's father was the largest
shareholder in IBM.
No sorry.
Sherman himself with the largest shareholder in IBM
because Thomas Watson had a couple of kids and Sherman
Fairchild's father who had been a partner with Tom Watson
only had Sherman.
So Sherman became the largest shareholder.
He had very old fashioned ideas.
One of which was that stock options were, in his words,
"Creeping socialism." And this was actually a
real problem for Noyce.
They were at almost constant loggerheads.
So in 1968, Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore decided to leave
and start their own company to build
semiconductor memories, actually.
Not microprocessors.
They started out as a memory company.
Gordon told me that he'll never forget that he left on
July 3, 1968 because payroll wouldn't pay him
for the July 4 holiday.
So Noyce's mantra here was small, small, small.
He wanted a small company.
Obviously, Intel did not stay small for very long.
There was a young research scientist who came up to
Gordon when he heard Gordon was leaving and said,
take me with you.
I want to follow you, basically.
That young research scientist was Andy Grove.
He joined Noyce and Moore in the office of the president
quite quickly.
And this picture, in case the ties didn't clue you in, was
taken in the 1970s.
1978 to be exact.
And I wanted to show you this.
This is Intel's 10th anniversary.
I wanted to show you this because I thought you, in
particular, would be interested in knowing how it
was that Intel worked--
the whole notion of an office of the president.
Particularly when the company was young.
So Noyce--
who's in the middle there-- was
generally called Mr. Outside.
Moore, Gordon-- well, you know Gordon Moore.
He's on Noyce's left, your right.
Gordon was called Mr. Inside.
And Andy with the luxurious mustache was called Mr.
Implementation in the beginning.
This was just how people generally knew them.
Noyce's job was to deal with the press, with customers,
with the board.
Later with the government.
Grove's job was to keep the line running.
He was in charge of all of the day to day detail work that
Noyce was so bad at and that Grove was so good at
keeping track of.
And then, Gordon Moore's job was to balance these sort of
signals that Noyce was receiving from the outside
with the signals that Andy was bringing in from the inside.
And then, kind of lay all of that out against advances in
the field in science and technology.
And so their differences just
complemented each other perfectly.
Their roles definitely evolved.
The way that they handled innovation at Intel early on
among these three I thought was very interesting too.
Noyce was always the sort of idea man.
He would say, you know, some day we're going to be able to
use microprocessors or circuits in some idea that
seemed as bizarre as I'm 12 years old.
I can build an 18 foot glider.
So almost a decade before anyone was putting
microprocessors into cars, Noyce was saying, we need to
be looking at the automotive market.
In the '60s, he was talking about how someday we'd have
what is essentially cruise control, pagers,
this sort of thing.
So Noyce would sort of come up with some big idea like this,
and then Gordon would say, well, gosh.
You know, in order for us to be able to do that, we're
going to have to transcend these sort of technical
problems, A and B. And then, Grove's job was to say, well,
my God, to do that we're going to have to hire X number more
employees and get Y amount of plant space under our belts.
So it was just a very, very fruitful sort of
collaboration.
Now, most stories about Bob Noyce tend to end right here.

He starts Fairchild.
He invents the integrated circuit.
He starts Intel.
And then you don't hear anything else about him.
But the fact is that Noyce lived for another 15 years
after he moved to the chairmanship of Intel in 1975.
And I was really excited to see that this part of Noyce's
life was as interesting as the time that came before it.
So he basically split his work for the last 15 years of his
life into two parts.
The first part was that he worked on behalf of the
American semiconductor industry to counter the threat
from Japanese firms that were selling chips that were as
good as the American chips, but being sold a lot less
expensively.

The concern in the 1980s over the Japanese semiconductor
industry makes the concerns that you hear today about
China and India and the sort of competitive advantages or
disadvantages that the United States has relative to them,
it makes those look like little baby concerns.
I had several people I spoke to tell me that during the
1980s, most of the founders of the American semiconductor
industry were fairly certain that their industry was going
to cease to exist in the United States.
So Noyce and four other execs.
started something called the Semiconductor Industry
Association, which is a very interesting little thing to
find out about.
It was a lobbying group.
And it's arguably the most successful lobbying group that
any industry trade group has ever put together.
So it was surprisingly interesting
to learn about that.
He was also the founding CEO of Sematech.
That's where this picture was taken.
Sematech--
I don't know how many of you are familiar with it.
Sematech was a huge kludge actually.
It was 14 American semiconductor manufacturers,
plus the Department of Defense, all supposed to
collaborate together on improving American
semiconductor manufacturing technology.
It was a big job.
Noyce took this job out of a sense of duty
and a sense of fear.
He said he didn't want to see his life's
work go up in smoke.
The other job he did, the other way he split his time,
was something he did out of a sense of love.
He mentored young entrepreneurs who were
starting their own companies.
He called this work restocking the stream I fished from.
So this is Bob Noyce and Steve Jobs in the late 1970s.
Steve Jobs said to me, "Bob Noyce took me under his wing.
He tried to give me a perspective that I could only
partially understand."
Now there are several Noyce-Jobs
stories in the book.
I just want to tell you my favorite, which is that Bob
Noyce had an airplane called a CB Now, the CB can land on
water or it could land on land.
So Bob invited Steve Jobs to come with him for
a trip in his CB.
They were going to fly up near Tahoe.
So they flew up.
They landed on a lake.
Isn't this cool, Bob says to Steve.
They take off again.
Unbeknownst to either of them, Noyce inadvertently locked the
wheels into water landing position instead of tarmac
landing position.
Which they only discovered when they went to land on a
runway and Jobs described-- he said, we hit the ground so
hard we started bouncing like crazy.
There were these sparks absolutely shooting past the
window and Noyce is furiously trying to control
the steering wheel.
Jobs talks about his knuckles just being so white he could
barely stand it.
And the whole time he's imagining the headline that
will run in the papers the next day, "Bob Noyce and Steve
Jobs killed in Fiery Plane Crash." I mean, it was just
this incredibly dramatic moment for him.
And as he was telling me this story, I was trying to
understand now, what is it about Bob Noyce that was so
important to him?
And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me
that Noyce offered Jobs a sense that this sort of-- the
sense of limitless and creativity
and vision and passion.
And just everything that these two both possessed in such
abundance that this isn't something that you have to
give up when you start or run a high tech company.
It can actually be the heart of the company.

And this is just my favorite picture of Bob Noyce.
I like it that he's wearing his little Intel badge.
So Steve Jobs was the most prominent of the entrepreneurs
that Noyce worked with.
But there were dozens of them, and several of them were
actually in tears telling me about how much
Noyce meant to them.
What Bob Noyce did was he gave people confidence in
themselves and in their own ideas.
He inspired people by the example of his own excellence.
And also, by his faith in them.
Noyce liked to say, "Don't be encumbered by history.
Go off and do something wonderful."
And if you could just imagine for a second what it would be
like to hear this.
If you're a newly hired employee at Intel and you
don't know whether you're going to be able to hack it.
Maybe you're an entrepreneur setting out for the first time
on your own.
Or maybe you have a couple failures behind you.
To have someone of Noyce's stature say to
you, you know what?
That doesn't matter.
What matters is what you do from this point forward.
And you can do something wonderful.
It was incredibly
inspirational to so many people.
I can't tell you how many people have told me that when
working for Bob Noyce, they did the best
work of their lives.
I heard this again and again.
And I believe it is this sense of bringing the next
generation under his wing and of restocking the stream, as
he put it, that is as important a contribution Bob
Noyce made to Silicon Valley and high technology as
starting Fairchild or starting Intel.
Or for that matter, even inventing
the integrated circuit.
I actually end the book talking about it, so I'll read
you the last paragraph of the book.
And it actually mentions Google.
There's an informal sort of generational succession in
Silicon Valley that places Noyce near the top of the
family tree.
A few years ago, for example, the founders of Google asked
Steve Jobs for advice and mentorship in the same way
Jobs had come to Noyce when Apple was young.
And even when there is no such explicit tie back to Noyce,
even if the latest generation of entrepreneurs do not know
his name, his influence endures in a set of ideals
that have become an indelible part of
American high tech culture.
Knowledge trumps hierarchy.
Every idea can be taken farther.
New and interesting is better than established and safe.
Go for broke or don't go at all.
There are countless other influences of course, but
Noyce's vision is embedded deep in the eye of the
swirling energy that is Silicon Valley.
His spirit quietly urging anyone who might listen to go
off and do something wonderful.
So that's the end of my talk.
[APPLAUSE]
LESLIE BERLIN: You can contact me through the site.
Reviews and such are on there too.
But I'm happy to take any questions that
anyone might have now.
About Noyce, about the writing process, about archives at
Stanford, anything you're interested in hearing about.

Yes?
AUDIENCE: When they originally founded Fairchild, was it
called Fairchild then, or did it
change when it was acquired?
LESLIE BERLIN: Yes.
What was Fairchild called when it was first founded?
It was called Fairchild Semiconductor.
The backing came from the parent, from Fairchild Camera
and Instrument.
But it was set up as an independent operation, so that
if it failed Fairchild Camera and Instrument wasn't going to
be in the hole for anything.
Yeah.
Other questions?

Oh, yes, hi.
AUDIENCE: I was wondering if you're researching something
else that now somebody else from the Silicon Valley or
[UNINTELLIGIBLE].
LESLIE BERLIN: So what's my next research project?
Anyone in the audience who has any excellent ideas for me on
next research projects, I would love to hear them.
I really love the Silicon Valley history and I'd like to
do some more of it.
So yeah, I'm open for suggestions on that.
It doesn't have to be a biography.

Yes?
AUDIENCE: [UNINTELLIGIBLE]
in addition to IC, he had also worked on tunnel diodes?
LESLIE BERLIN: Yes.
Yeah.
Did Noyce also work on the tunnel diode?
Yeah, actually, if you go to this site, I published an
article in IEEE Spectrum and it's linked to it here.
Noyce did do--
he sort of independently conceived of the tunnel diode.
Independent of Esaki, Leo Esaki in about
almost the same time.
But when he showed his ideas to William Shockley, for whom
he was working, William Shockley told him that that
was just a bunch garbage and go throw it--
you know, don't worry about it.
And Esaki went on to win the Nobel Prize for his research.
Noyce actually never won the Nobel Prize.
Although arguably, he could have won one there had he
actually published his research.
And he would have won one undoubtedly for the integrated
circuit when Jack Kilby won for the
integrated circuit in 2000.
I didn't know this actually, but the Nobel Prize is not
awarded posthumously.
And since Noyce had died in 1990, he couldn't receive it.
Though both the Academy and Kilby, himself, spoke about
how he should have.