The Intel Trinity

From Shockley to Fairchild

Silicon Valley, once just the San Francisco marshlands, is the world’s center for advanced technology. Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Intel and many other such companies now operate from Silicon Valley. Before these giants existed, inventors and smaller companies built the foundations of today’s megabusinesses. Intel is at the center of Silicon Valley in innovation, tenacity, design prowess, inventions and leadership.

The company's story began in 1957, when seven employees left Shockley Transistor in Mountain View, CA. Founder William Shockley – co-inventor of the transistor – was a highly regarded scientist, but also a paranoid, abusive boss who made his employees take lie detector tests. The young scientists (the oldest was 29) who resigned in unison were the best minds in solid-state physics.

The team chose activist Bob Noyce, a natural leader, as its manager, and formed a new company to design transistors based on silicon, one of Earth’s most plentiful elements. Noyce presented the idea to Sherman Fairchild, owner of Fairchild Camera & Instrument Company, explaining that the scientists could make small, cheap...