Welcome to Tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with iHeart Podcasts and How the Tech are you. So it's President's Day here in the United States, and as such, it is a holiday in our office, so our office is not open. But I didn't want to leave you without an episode on a Monday, and so we're actually dipping into our classics, which we don't do as frequently these days. This is actually a part one of a multi part podcast, but I thought it's still really fascinating. It's telling the story of a very important company and its origins. It is the Intel Story, Part one. I hope you enjoy. Today we're going to do another one of my wonderful episodes about the history of a big company in technology. And I use the word wonderful somewhat tongue in cheek, because it's weird to toot one's own horn. But I genuinely enjoy researching these episodes because I always learned something that I didn't know before about companies that I'm really familiar with from a product standpoint, but maybe not so much behind the scenes. That's certainly the case with today's topic. Intel. Now, Intel is a major player in the computer's industry, obviously in 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 some point or another in your life, you've used a device that had a little sticker on it that said that there was Intel in side. The company is famous for producing the chips that make our computers and electronics so powerful. So they're famous for making the stuff that makes our other stuff work. But what is the actual story behind the company. Well, to understand that, we're gonna have to do something that I'm infamous for doing, which is that we're going to have to go roll the clock back well before there ever was an Intel. Because I really do think that to have a true understanding of any subject, not just a company, but really anything, you need to go back quite a bit and get the foundation set before you start just spouting off facts. I could tell you that Intel was founded in the late nineteen sixties and pick up from there. But without understanding the pathway that led there, you don't have as full an appreciation. At least in my opinion, that's the case. Certainly personally for me, that's the case. So we're going to look at a couple of companies that preceded Intel to understand why there's an Intel in the first place, and we'll talk about the Traitorous Eight. There's treachery involved in this story, and we'll also talk about Moore's Law. That's going to play a big part in this discussion as well, because all of this is wrapped up in the birth of Intel, and it's a story of not just technology, but of people. And as we all know, people are complicated critters. We're capable of great and terrible things, and sometimes things that are both great and terrible at the same time. So today we're going to look at some stories about people who made amazing contributions to us in the form of engineering, advancing science, understanding the physics of electronics at a deeper level that allowed us to create incredible gadgets. But we'll also learn some not so nice stuff, some things about people that were or at least disturbing, if not worse. But much of our story is going to revolve around semiconductors, so as a refresher, a semiconductor is a class of material that has a much lower resistance to the flow of electrical current in one direction than it does in the other direction. If you listen to my episodes about the history of electricity, you remember about the concept of resistance, right, that's the tendency of any given material to resist the flow of electrons. So, if you have something that's a really good conductor, it tends to have a very low resistance. It allows electrons to move through fairly freely. But something with a very high resistance, like a very very high resistance that's an insulator, it doesn't allow electrons to pass through nearly as easily. If you're able to take a conductor and you're able to lower the temperature near to absolute zero, it ends up becoming a superconductor, meaning that there's no resistance at all, and it allows electrons to pass through without any resistance. So resistance is this tendency to again resist the flow of electrons. It turns out that in some materials this is a variable where under one set of circumstances, electrons will flow through very easily, and under a different set of circumstances using that same material, electrons will not flow through nearly as easily. These are what we call semiconductors, because sometimes they conduct and sometimes they do not. It can be useful to think of this as sort of like an inclined plane or a slide. If you have a marble and you let it roll down a slide, it does so easily with very little effort, right. You just have to move it so it hits that inclined plane and gravity does the rest of the work. To move the marble back up the slide, you have to put forth some effort. You have to push the marble up the slide, working against gravity to do so. Semiconductors are kind of similar, except we're talking about electrons, not large macro objects like marbles. And it's not a perfect analogy, but it allows you to kind of understand what's going on now. A semiconductor's tendency to allow or prevent electricity from flowing through it can be altered in a few different ways depending upon the material. So, for example, some semiconductor material will change its resistance if you introduce some impurities into it. This is called doping, where you strategically add in some of these impurities to change it from being say pure silicon, to doped silicon, and this would allow for the transfer of electrons in one direction more easily. Or you might be able to change the resistance of a semiconductor by applying a magnetic field to it, or there are other ways of changing Like I mentioned with superconductors, that's temperature. So there are a lot of different factors that can change the way a conductor conducts electricity, whether it's with little resistance or with a great deal of resistance. The first recorded use of the word semiconducting that I know of came from Alessandro Volta. And again if you listen to those history of Electricity episodes, then you know that Volta was an eighteenth century philosopher and inventor who created an early battery called the voltaic pile. But as brilliant as Volta was, he did not actually lay down any theories about what semi conductors are or what was going on, largely because he did not have a full understanding of what electricity was. Remember, for centuries people thought electricity was some form of fluid. They didn't have a full understanding of what it actually was. In the nineteenth century, you had Michael Faraday. He was another scientist, and he noticed that silver sulfide's electrical resistance would change at different temperatures. So he made this observation. If he changed the temperature of silver sulfide, the resistance would also change. Johann Hittorff, who was another scientist, published a study about temperature dependence of the electrical conductivity of certain materials, adding to more knowledge about the nature of semiconductors. Several scientists formulated theories about semiconductors and the factors that would cause them to change their resistance to electrical flow, but it wouldn't be until the mid twentieth century that someone figured out how they could be used to solve what was becoming a very tricky problem. Now, initially this problem was all about signal amplification. Now, signals are very important in all sorts of different electronic applications, and often the signal that you generate maybe very weak and you need to amplify it. You need to increase the amplitude of the signal in order for you to do something useful with it that. It was certainly the case with telephone communication. In the early twentieth century. A little company called AT and T was struggling with this because they were laying out a coast to coast network of telephone lines. They were allowing for transcontinental phone calls, but they needed to be able to boost the signal that went along the telephone lines so that the thing you heard on one end would be intelligible, so that if I'm talking in Atlanta and I want someone in San Francisco to hear me, the signal remains strong throughout the entire journey from Atlanta to San Francisco. So they needed to figure out a way to amplify signals, and initially they were looking at using vacuum tubes. Now AT and T was really interesting in innovating in this space, largely because the company was starting to worry about its patents, and it purchased several patents from Alexander Graham Bell, who we attribute the creation of the telephone to, and those patents were what allowed AT and T to maintain a strategic advantage over other potential competitors. But patents they expire after a while. So once they expire, that information is then available for anyone to use without having to pay a license. So the patent allows you to see how people are doing things, but it prevents you from following that same example unless you license the information from the patent holder. Well, once a patent expires, it's free game. So AT and T was looking at these patents expiring and they said, well, we really need to innovate in other spaces to maintain our competitive advantage. And you've heard me probably talk about Aten He I did some episodes about the company not that long ago, and they were very good at maintaining their advantage for a really long time, even after they got broken up by the United States government. Well, the company was so concerned about this they even brought Thomas Vale out of retirement, that was their former president of the company, and they wanted to really tackle this problem. And again, initially they started to use vacuum tubes as signal amplifiers. These were 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, so you'd have to replace them fairly regularly. They were also very long, large and bulky, so you could not have a small form factor for whatever device you were using that had vacuum tube amplifiers in it. And they generated a lot of heat, which in some applications is problematic. Now, there are some things where people still love to use vacuum tubes as their signal amplifier. People who use amplifiers for musical instruments love, generally speaking, amplifiers that use vacuum tubes. Those are valued very highly in the musical field. But for something like long distance telephone calls, it was seen as sort of a band aid to the problem. And so the company AT and T was really interested in figuring out an alternative to these, and they tasked their research and development ARM to try and come up with something. That ARM was known as Bell Labs. They wanted to find an alternative to vacuum tubes, something that could boost a signal similar to the tubes, but take up a fraction of size and put out very little heat comparatively speaking. The team leader for this project at Bell Labs was a guy named William Bill Shockley. Now, in a way, Shockley would become partly responsible for the foundation of Intel, but it wasn't because he was a founder of Intel. He wasn't. He was not among the co founders of Intel. However, you could argue that he was at least partly responsible for Intel ever existing. Shockley was born in London, England, but both his parents were American. His father was a mining engineer who had contract work in the UK and so had moved his family to the United Kingdom. His mother was one of the first women to graduate Stanford, and she held degrees in mathematics and art. Now, apparently the Shackley family was a group of curmudgeonly folks. They were a little grouchy. From all accounts, they might have had arrested As a family feature. His parents never seemed to be able to stay in one place for more than a year, so they moved around a lot, and Shockley himself would develop many of the same characteristics as his parents, being a little difficult to be around, which is probably a generous way of putting it now. Eventually, Shockley attended the California Institute of Technology or cal TECH, back in nineteen twenty eight, and he majored in physics. He was apparently really quite the prankster over at cal Tech. Supposedly his pranks were the stuff of legend. I did not, however, look into those for this episode, maybe in a future one. He pursued a doctorate at MIT in nineteen thirty three, and then he became an apprentice to a man named Philip Morse, and as a result he got a job at Bell Labs. He gained a reputation as a brilliant and innovative problem solver. Now this is a bit of a tangent, but it's an example of his sense of innovation. He was one of the people who made an early design for a nuclear reactor. He actually partnered with a guy named James Fisk to work on this. They were trying to suss out how you could make a sustained nuclear reaction, and Shockley's idea was that you could use uranium in little chunks, and you could separate the chunks of uranium from each other using some other material, and the purpose of that material would be to slow down but not capture neutrons as they're given off by the uranium, and by doing that, allowing the neutrons to hit other atoms of U two thirty five and thus generate more neutrons as the U two thirty five would decay, and these neutrons would then move out to again impact other U two thirty five atoms and sustain the reaction, so that you would just continuously have this release of radioactive energy. Now, their work would end up being classified by the US government, as this was during World War II and considered highly dangerous material. It turned out that the scientists who were working on the Manhattan Project were concentrating on essentially the same thing that Fisk and Shockley were thinking about, except, of course, Shocklei and Fisk were mostly interested in a nuclear reactor, whereas the Manhattan Project was all about a more uncontrolled nuclear reaction to create a bomb. But they were all working on similar things. They didn't have any knowledge of each other because the US government was very much concerned with keeping this stuff secret and safe from potential enemies, so they didn't know anything about each other's projects until after World War two had ended. I interrupt this classic episode about the Intel story in order for us to take a quick break to thank our sponsors. Now, before the war, Shockley had actually worked with a guy named Walter Brittain who together they were trying to create this alternative to vacuum tube technology, a solid state alternative to vacuum tube amplifiers. But while they were working on it, it didn't go anywhere. They couldn't create something that was actually working. Then the war happened and their attentions were elsewhere. But after the war, Shockley decided to try this again. They brought on another theorist over to Bell Labs named John Bardeen. Now Bardeen and Britain were starting to work together closely to try and create this alternative vacuum tubes, and Shockley was the administrative leader for their team, but he was mostly working on his own on his own little processes and inventions, So he would occasionally stop in see what the two were working on, give some guidance or maybe some suggestions, and then he would head off often work on his own some more so, he was not actually part of the team that, on December sixteenth, nineteen forty seven, unveiled the first working transistor, a solid state alternative to vacuum tube technology instead. That was Britain and Bardeen who created that first point contact resist transistor, and that would become the foundation for the electronics industry. The transistor that is not the point contact version, just the transistor in general. And I've done episodes about transistor, so I'm not going to talk about it too much. But the reason our electronics are so small is because engineers developed the transistor. Otherwise we would still be dependent upon vacuum tubes and that would really limit the types of technology we could have at our disposal because they would be so bulky and hot. So it really did open up an enormous world of opportunity for really everyone and ultimately, but especially at and t early on now Shockley reportedly had a complicated reaction to the development of this first transistor. On one hand, he was really proud of his team. He was leading a team that had made a major scientific and engineering breakthrough with the invention of the transistor. But on the other end, he was a little disappointed and frustrated that he was not directly part of this team. And he also had his pride hurt quite a bit because he had attempted to do the same thing before World War Two but could never get it to work. But these other two guys they got it to work. So I have a feeling that he felt a little upset that he did not come up with the solution to this problem. Rather these other two guys did. He didn't let that completely derail him. However, while he was in a hotel room in Chicago where he was attending the American Physical Society convention, he came up with an alternative to the point contact transistor called the sandwich transistor, which was easier to manufacture than the point contact type, so it ended up immediately being a replacement for this initial design of transistors. It did the same thing in a different form factor. So while he was a little might have been a little bitter about not being in on the team when they made this breakthrough, he then immediately almost made an improvement to that design to make it more practical. At and T made a decision. It was kind of a political decision on the back end, because you had Britain and Bardeen, who were the two guys who actually invented the transistor, but then you had Shockley, who was the administrative lead of the team and who had at least had some input, although not directly responsible for the invention, and AT and T wanted to make sure they didn't step on any toes, so they made a decision where they say that any photo of the transistor that was to include the development team would also have to have Shockli in it, sort of as a way of saying his contributions were important or instrumental for the development of the transistor. Now, this also tended to rub other people the wrong way, people who said he didn't have nearly enough involvement to justify being in every single photo of this transistor. So it created a little bit of drama. And also Shockli was reportedly difficult to work with at times. He had a very forceful and somewhat brusque personality that people didn't always enjoy being around. I'm dancing around it a lot, but it's largely because I never met Shockli, so I can't tell any firsthand information. I'm merely reporting what other people have said and even third and fourth hand accounts of that sort of stuff. So I like to be careful and not put too many words in too many people's mouths. If I can. Shockley, to his credit, always tried to make sure that any stories that were about this transistor indicated that Britain and Bardeen had been the ones to make the breakthrough. So he wasn't trying to steal credit, he wasn't claiming it for his own. He wanted to make sure that the people responsible were credited with their work. But often Shockley would be cited as the primary or sometimes sole inventor of the transistor. That the narrative sort of became. He had been working on it, he was derailed by World War Two, came back and now it's a thing, and he would point out that's an oversimplification of what had happened in many different respects. And in nineteen fifty six he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the transistor, along with Britain and Bardeen. But the fact that he also got a Nobel Prize for this when he wasn't directly involved with the invention of the first working transistor again upset some people. Shockley would end up completely alienating himself from Britain and Bardeen. Neither of them wanted to work with him anymore. They felt that it was a difficult working relationship. Bardeen and Britain would actually both refuse to work with Shockley, and in nineteen fifty three Shockley himself left Bell Labs and first he went back to Caltech and he worked there for a while, but he was looking for something more permanent, and then he encountered a financier named Arnold Beckmann, and with Beckmann's help and some funding, Shockley founded a new company in California called the Shackley Semiconductor Company. They picked a location near Stanford in northern California. Shockley thought that that was an attractive spot, that the weather, the climate there was really nice, the location was beautiful, it was close to Stanford, so it would make it easy to recruit students who were already at Stanford directly out of school to come work at Shacklei Semiconductor. So he thought of this as a y strategy. And in fact, Shacklei had a reputation for being able to recognize brilliant scientists and engineers. Maybe he couldn't manage them because of his personality, but he certainly could recognize them, and so he was really good at recruiting people who would be very very strong performers in the semiconductor industry. By the way, SHACKLEI semi Conductor would become the second company in Silicon Valley. This is the early early days of Silicon Valley, before you had countless companies there, and shackle semi Conductor was the second such company in Silicon Valley. The first one was Hewitt Packard, which was found in a Palo Alto garage back in nineteen thirty nine and really set the standard for founding a company in Silicon Valley. There were so many companies that were founded in garages from that point forward, some of them in Silicon Valley, some of them in other places. So Apple Computers, for example, founded in a garage in Palo Alto, California. Microsoft also founded in a garage, but that time we're talking more about Washington, not about California. Still same kind of thing. Well, you got Hewitt Packard that paved the way back in nineteen thirty nine, and then Shockley Semiconductor becoming the second company in Silicon Valley. This was before it had even developed that name. And Shockley, always good at recognizing strong talent, hired on some brilliant people to join his team. And two of those people were Gordon Moore and Robert Nois, who would eventually go on to found Intel. But we're not there yet. As long as I've talked about Shockley Semiconductor, we haven't gotten to the point where Noise and More go off to find Intel. We actually have some more drama first with Shockley, and then we have another company to talk about before we even get to Intel. But first let's give some background on both Moore and Noise. Gordon Moore grew up in California and was really interested in science as a kid. He earned his PhD in chemistry and physics from Caltech and he joined the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland. While he was there, his chief responsibility was working on solid rocket propellants for the US Navy. But he felt that his talents would be better suited for the private sector and that that would be more challenging and profitable, so he decided to relocate, moved back to California, and he joined Shockley Semiconductor. Robert Nois grew up in Iowa and was interested in physics and inventing at an early age. He earned degrees in physics at Grinnell College and a PhD in solid state physics from MIT. He went to work for the phil Co Corporation before meeting William Shockley, who recruited him to join Shockley Semiconductor. But William Shockley's management style was rough. People did not like working for him or with him, and several members of his engineering team started to resent William Shockley, and in nineteen fifty seven, just a year after most of them had joined the company less than a year in some cases, a group of eight engineers, including More and Neis, tried to remove Shockley as the head of Shockley semi Conductor. This attempt failed. They were not able to do that, so instead all eight of them quit the company to go and found their own company. Buckley was absolutely livid about this. He was incredibly angry, and he would thenceforth refer to those eight gentlemen as the traitorous eight, because they had betrayed him by leaving his company after he had given them all the opportunities. Now, William Shockley's legacy is at best complicated. He made notable contributions in science and engineering, and without those contributions we would not have the technology we have today, we would probably be a few years behind where we are right now. But he was also a complicated guy who had awful ideas in philosophy and ideology. So, for example, in the nineteen sixties, Shockley began to espouse his theory of dysgenics, which included the racist notion that people of African descent were naturally the intellectual inferiors of peaceeople of European stock. So he garnered a lot of criticism for these views, which he was not shy in sharing, and it has in many ways diminished people's opinions of Shockley and affected how we even talk about his contributions to engineering and science, which were considerable, but his insistence that dysgenics was a valid worldview was undeniably terrible. So that when I said great and terrible things, this would definitely fall into that terrible category. And it also illustrates how a lot of people found William Shockley difficult to be around. The traders ate, however, had their own goal, which was creating their own company. Now was that company Intel? Well, we'll find out after we take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Okay, So No, the new company was not Intel, not yet. The new company that these eight men founded was called Fairchild Semiconductor. Now this was an extension of an already existing company. That company was Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation. So this company that produced cameras and other instruments wanted to get into the burgeoning semiconductor and transistor business, but they didn't really have the wherewithal to do it within the company itself. So these eight people come up to the company and say, hey, we just left Shockley Semiconductor. We're free to work with you. We'd be willing to set up the Fairchild Semiconductor Company. You give us the capital to start the company, will start producing products for Fairchild. So it was a great relationship. Fairchild got an enormous jump ahead of the competition because these were some of the leading thinkers in transistors and semiconductors of the time. So it allowed Fairchild to get a really big head start over other competitors. Now this podcast is not the Fairchild Semiconductor story. I've actually talked about Fairchild semi Conductor in a previous episode. But Noise and more, who I promise are going to co found Intel before this episode is over. They were at Fairchild semi Conductor for eleven years, so it hoops us to learn a little bit more about what they accomplished while they were there. Now, one of the most important contributions Noise made at Fairchild was the development of the integrated circuit. These days, integrated circuits are common, so it can be a little challenging to understand and how important this was, how big a deal it was at the time. But let's just use our imaginations for a little moment now. Before Noise and also a Texas instrument's engineer named Jack Kilby who was independently working on the same challenge. Circuits were made of independent, discrete components that were attached to each other with wires. So every element of a circuit was its own little, separate do hickey that was connected by wires to other do hickeys in the circuit. The do hickeys dependent upon whatever you wanted the circuit to do, whether they were resistors or they were some form of electrical load like a light or something else, switches, that sort of stuff. So these were Macro's circuits, right. They're large, they are things that you could work with with your hands if you needed to, and if you were to look at early circuitry, each individual component would be its own thing. Graded circuits, as the name suggests, is a circuit in which all those components are integrated together on a single wafer of semiconductor material. Now, both Noise over at Fairchild and Kilby over at Texas Instruments developed this idea independently, and both of them got credit for it. The Noise came up with a means of creating the connections between components on a circuit using a process called the planar process. This involves evaporating lines of conductive material directly onto the semiconductor wafer. So this is sort of like designing the wires the connect of different pieces together, but you do it by evaporating this metallic material so that it forms on the subway the semiconductor wafer and a very specific pattern that allows the connections between the different components. And it was a revolutionary technique at the time. As for Gordon Moore, his most famous miss contribution during his time at Fairchild is what we now call Moore's law. Now that's not to say it was his most important contribution, but it's the one that most folks are aware of now. This comes from an observation he made in a paper that he titled Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits, which was published in the journal Electronics in nineteen sixty five. And it's probably not what you think it is. Moore's law tends to be slightly misconstrued from the way that Gordon Moore presented it in this paper. The common interpretation today is that Moore's law means that every eighteen to twenty four months computers double in processing power. So a computer from two years ago would be half as powerful as the computer you can buy today, and a computer two years from now will be twice as powerful as the computers you buy today. Computer from four years ago would be half as powerful as one from two years ago, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And so Moore was making an observation about the linear relationship between time and in this interpretation, processing power of computers. But that's not entirely what Moore was actually talking about back in nineteen sixty five. Instead, Moore was observing that as companies developed more advanced methods of designing, producing, and mass manufacturing, discrete components, namely transistors, onto integrated circuits. It followed this linear pathway. So a company would make a breakthrough, it would invest in the manufacturing process to develop a transistor or rather smaller transistor, so that you could fit more of those transistors on a single semiconductor chip, and then they would make money by selling this more advanced semiconductor chip with more transistors on it, which would give them more money to put back into research and development and to make even smaller transistors to make more powerful semiconductor chips and then sell those in future circuits. So, in other words, Moore was pointing out that this trend was supported by the economics of the semiconductor and integrated circuit industries. This wasn't so much a commentary on technological progress, but more how the market supported the ability for engineers to research and develop and design and produce these more powerful circuits. It's a delicate and subtle difference from the way Moore's law tends to be communicated, but I think it's an important distinction. There's profit to be made in innovation. So moreover, this classical approach of cramming more components onto an integrated circuit would eventually become inaccurate as well. So originally it was Gordon Moore saying, here, in nineteen sixty five, we can fit twice as many transistors on a chip as we could back in nineteen sixty three, and the reason for that is that we have developed enough technology due to the economic viability of these chips, to have the size of the transistors and thus double the number that can be on a semiconductor chip. Same thing would hold true that this observation, as long as it maintains that linear pathway, means that in two years will fit twice as many transistors as today. Two years more, it'll be twice as many as that, et cetera, et cetera. That's not exactly the truth. Now we don't really see the number of discrete components doubling every eighteen to twenty four months. Today, we're really talking about components that are on the nanoscale. So a nanometer is one billionth of a meter. That is a scale that is so small you cannot view it with an optical microscope. You would need a scanning electron microscope or something along those lines. Optical microscopes aren't going to allow you to see things on the nanoscale. That's how tiny these components are. In microprocessors today. At that scale, quantum effects come into play, these weird quantum mechanics effects that mean your structures may not behave the way you intended because of things like electron tunneling. Electron tunneling is a fancy way of saying electrons be crazy yo. Essentially, electrons have an area of potential where they could be at any given moment around their respective atoms, or if they're free floating electrons. It just means there's a zone within which the electron might be at any point, like it may be if you were to draw a circle, you could imagine that the electron could be anywhere within that circle at any given moment. Transistors involve electron gates that are supposed to control the flow of electrons. Either they allow them to pass through or do not allow them to pass through. If the electron gates get so thin that this zone where an electron can appear can sometimes be on the other side of a closed gate. It means that sometimes the electron is on the other side of the closed gate, even though it didn't have to go through the gate itself. It's as if the electron has tunneled through the gate. This is a non trivial problem when you're talking about transistors that have to govern the movement of electrons. Now, engineers have figured out ways around this, using different materials in different architectures, but it does mean that we're rapidly approaching a point where we can't just make stuff smaller. We're getting to a fundamental limit of how small these components can be while still running on the basics of computer logic and electricity the way we have been running them in the past. However, it does mean that we don't really talk about cramming more components onto a chip. Necessarily, we talk about what its output is. Can it put out twice as much processing power as the ones that came eighteen months or twenty four months ago. That's kind of how we frame Moore's law these days. By the way, you might wonder, if Moore's law is true and computers are getting twice as fast every couple of years, why is it that my computers never seem to get twice as fast. Well, the problem with that is that you have software bloat that often goes along with these improvements and hardware. So if your software is demanding more and more resources from a computer as it gets more advanced, as new types of software come out, then all you're really doing is just trying to stay ahead of the software bloat With more powerful hardware. The software just takes more advantage of the hardware that's there, because the software two years from now is going to require more assets than the software from today, So it's just constantly treading water. You never really get to a point where the computer really feels twice as fast as your old computer, unless you're just running legacy software, in which case you might say, wow, this is wicked fast, all right. Noise and More both did very well at Fairchild. Robert Noise became the general manager of Fairchild Semiconductor. Gordon Moore was the head of research and development. But while they and the six others whom Shockley named traders were the ones to found the company, they didn't really control the company. It still fell under the umbrella of the parent company, Fairchild Camera and Instrument which meant that Noise and More and all the others still had to answer to other people, people who didn't all have the same priorities that they did. So one big sticking point was that Fairchild Camera and Instrument was taking some of the profits from Fairchild Semiconductor and using them in areas outside the semiconductor industry. They were investing them in other parts of the company. So to Noise and More, it felt like Fairchild Camera and Instrument was siphoning away some of the profits they were generating in order to support other parts of their business, and they didn't like that. So they felt the money should have remained with the semiconductor industry, maybe invested back into the company or into the employees. And it became increasingly disenchanted with the way things were running. So in July nineteen sixty eight, Noise and More both tendered their resignation from Fairchild Semiconductor. So they had already left Shockley Semiconductor to found Fairchild Semiconductor. Now they were going to leave Fairchild semi Conductor to found a third company. They each put fourth a quarter of a million dollars as an initial investment in this new company, so together they had a half million, and they raised another two and a half million from various investors, who were primarily organized by a businessman named Arthur Rock. And by the way, here's another fun trivia note. Arthur Rock, the businessman who arranged to get that two and a half million, He's the guy who came up with the term venture capitalist. So if you've ever heard venture capitalist, that was a term coined by Arthur Rock, the guy who helped fund Intel. Now, according to the founders, they presented Arthur Rock with a business proposal that was a grand total of one pages long. It only was one page, very simple business proposal that essentially said they wanted to form a company that would build integrated circuits. So Rock got on board. He managed to secure the funding from various investors. He put in ten thousand of his own dollars into the investment pool, and he would eventually become the first chairman of the new company. But why are they gonna call it? So first they started thinking about potential names. They said, well, maybe we can name it after ourselves. But then they realized that they called it the More Noise Company, it would sound like more noise and somehow being the head of the More Noise Company didn't seem terribly attractive. They then went with the company name n M Electronics. The initials of their last names of Noise and More. But this didn't last very long either, and within a month or so they were changing their minds. They decided to go with a totally different name, and they renamed their new company Intel, which was inspired by the phrase integrated Electronics. So they took INT from integrated and l from Electronics to get Intel. They couldn't just adopt the name right away, however, because there were as another business called Intelco. That had the rights to it. So first Nois and Moore purchased the rights to the name, and then they used Intel and Intel was officially born. They located the company in Santa Clara, California, and shortly after establishing Intel, they recruited a guy named Andrew Grove from Fairchild Semiconductor. The three of them would each serve as the chairman and chief executive officer of Intel at some point over the next three decades. A bit later, in nineteen sixty nine, they released the company logo. The original logo had Intel in all lowercase letters. You can still see that today, but the original logo had the E in Intel at a lower level than the rest of the letters, so it was dropped down. The dropped down e logo is what they called it now. At first, Intel's concentration was the design and production of memory chips, which included a bipolar memory chip called the three to one H one shlot Key. Bipolar in this case doesn't have to do with any sort of personality issue. It's just to talk about the specific type of memory. This helped the company get some attention while it developed more innovative products, and then the company made waves by launching the first metal oxide semiconductor for static random access memory, also known as the eleven ZHO one. Now, there are lots of different types of computer memory. There's ROM memory, or read only memory RAM, or random access memory, cache memory, and tons more. As the name suggests, the purpose of memory is to store some sort of information so that the computer might refer to it for any given application. Storing information and computer memory simplifies things, speeds it up considerably because the computer doesn't have to reference some other form of storage each time it needs to reference a particular piece of information. Instead, it stores that information in computer memory so it can reference it very quickly. And I've talked a lot about 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 spreadsheet are called word lines. The intersection of bitlines and word lines is the address of a memory cell, and computers can access information stored in RAM using this general address. Right they know the address of the memory cell, they can pull the information out of that cell right away. This is really useful and it's pretty fast. This differentiates RAM from sequential memory. Sequential memory, as it sounds, is stored in sequence. This would be like a tape, a videotape or a cassette tape where you have to actually go at the beginning of the piece of data and move down, go all the way through the data to find the section that you need in order to retrieve it. It's much more time consuming. If you want an analogy, imagine that you have an enormous book with tons of information written down in it, but it has no table of contents. There are no page numbers. There are no chapter headings, so if you wanted to find something specific in the book, you would have to essentially start at the beginning and start skimming through line by line to try and find the information you wanted. But if you had a similar book that was organized in chapters with page numbers, section numbers, that sort of thing, and it has an amazing index, you would be able to find what you were looking for pretty quickly. That's what RAM does with computers. And I might do a full episode to talk about the actual science and technology behind memory, but that would take up so much time, and for now we're just going to skip over it and just say Intel's first products were memory chips. But where they sit successful. We'll find out about that. We'll have to come back after a quick break to thank our sponsor. EH kind of successful. The eleven oh one met with limited success, and that was largely because the approach, while it was innovative, was a little limited in that first memory chip. In nineteen seventy, Intel launched the eleven oh three, which was a dynamic RAM chip or d RAM chip with one kill a byte of memory, though some records say it was one kill a bit, which is actually a pretty big difference. Remember, a byte is eight bits of information, and a bit is your basic unit of information. It's either a zero or a one. This was a much more useful chip than the somewhat limited eleven oh one, and it became a successful product for the company. One of their first big customers for the eleven oh three was Honeywell Incorporated. Honeywell is another huge name in computers. I'll need to do a full episode about Honeywell in the future. The company chose Intel's chips to replace the core memory technology in Honeywell computer so this was an enormous win for Intel. That same year, Intel purchased twenty six acres of land on the corner of Coffin Road and Central Expressway in Santa Clara. It had been a peach orchard. So just think if they had gone with that land first. If Intel had bought that land as its first action, maybe they would have not named themselves Intel. Maybe they would have given themselves some sort of peach name because they bought a peach orchard. Maybe we would have ended up with peach chips and apple products further down the line, which would make a delicious Cobbler Cobbler the company's innovations and memory would eventually become the industry standard, which, as you can imagine, was great news for Intel. But the innovation didn't stop there. Now we're going to end this episode in nineteen seventy one, which was just a couple of years after the company was founded. But that's because there were some really big things that happened in nineteen seventy one. First, Intel introduced a new technology that year called erasable programmable read only memory or e PROM or sometimes just EROM memory. This chip had an incredibly useful feature. It could retain information in computer memory even after you switched off the computer's power. So typically a power cycle will wipe out computer memory because once you remove power, nothing is going to the memory. It cannot maintain its state and it returns to a base state. So anything that was stored in memory is essentially wiped out. The information that you have stored on the hard drive or whatever other media you're using is still there, but the stuff that was in this volatile computer memory is gone. E PROM was a type of non volatile computer memory, meaning that when you had power cut off, it would maintain the state that it was in before power was removed, thus it would remain within computer memory. This particular Intel product was called the seventeen oh two because Intel had a habit of numbering products, which made it a little less sexy than other company products, but at least you could figure out what each thing did based upon the numbering system that Intel used. Also, in nineteen seventy one, the company would make another big step. They would go public. They would hold an initial public offering. So from its founding in nineteen sixty eight through to nineteen seventy one, it was a private company. It was supporting itself mainly through through sales and through more rounds of venture capital. But eventually they were making enough a success to go public. It was only three years in so they held an IPO and stocks for priced at twenty three dollars and fifty cents per share, and the company raised six point eight million dollars. Now, compared to some modern day electronics companies and tech companies, six point eight million dollars seems laughable, right you think of Intel, It's this enormous company and it got to start with an IPO that only raised six point eight million. When you see IPOs today for other companies in the dozens and dozens or hundreds of millions of dollars for evaluation. It's crazy to think about it. But then also remember this was nineteen seventy one. So for one thing, we got to adjust for inflation, well we don't. I already did it. The adjustment for inflation would be around forty one million dollars in today's month, so still modest compared to some tech companies today, but it was an enormous sum back then. Keep in mind this is before the personal computer industry. Computers at this point are still monstrously large things that research institutions and some big companies have, and that's it. So it was still a pretty enormous story. I wouldn't turn down forty one million dollars, by the way, So if anyone wants to make an investment of forty one million dollars in Jonathan Strickland, I'm more than willing to enter negotiations. So just throwing that out there. Intel employees also in nineteen seventy one got to move into their new headquarters building, which had been constructed on that land they had purchased earlier. They owned this building. Intel owned the land, they owned the building itself. They were no longer renting out space from other companies, so nineteen seventy one had to move in day, which is kind of cool. And also in nineteen seventy one, that was when Intel got into the business most people know them for, which would be microprocessors. Now that project would actually date all the way back to the founding of Intel or shortly thereafter. They started the project in nineteen sixty nine. It wasn't until nineteen seventy one that they had something to show for it. But in nineteen sixty nine, another company called the Nipon Calculating Machine Corporation came to Intel and said, we want you to design twelve custom chips for our printing calculator, which would be the Boozycom one four one PF or busycom, probably because it's spelled like business, but it's busycom, not boozycom. But I'm sure after using a printing calculator that was one of the earliest ones ever made, you'd probably want it to be a Boozycom, I'm guessing. Anyway, Intel engineers took a look at this proposal and they countered. They said, we could actually make what you want, but with four custom chips instead of twelve. One of those custom chips 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 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 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 a headline that read, announcing a new era in integrated electronics, and that's exactly what it was. The ability to create a programmable central processing unit was a non trivial contribution to the advancement of electronics and computer science. I hope you enjoyed this episode about the Intel story, and I hope you're all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.