Inside Intel. Tim Jackson

of disloyalty for an employee to raise an issue with someone higher up if he was dissatisfied with the response he had been given by his immediate superior.

      Visionaries before their time, Noyce and Moore saw that in a fast-moving industry where speed of response to change was all-important, and where information had to flow as swiftly as possible if the company was to make the right decision, this approach did not make sense. Instead, they wanted to encourage anyone who had a good idea to speak up, anyone who had a question to ask it. Staff meetings were to be open to anyone who thought they could contribute something by attending; no manager, no matter how senior, should refuse a request for help or information from another employee.

      The prestige of Intel’s stars was never in doubt – the PA system kept drumming it in, day after day, as announcements went out every few minutes for Doctor Noyce, Doctor Moore, Doctor Grove. But they were very visible, mucking in where needed. If a circuit layout needed to be checked, Bob Noyce would be ready to lend a hand. If a process designer needed to know something about the behaviour of transistors under specific temperature ranges, Andy Grove would be ready to pull down from the shelf the textbook he had written on semiconductor physics, identify the key equations that predicted how a substance would behave, and help to turn the equations into statements in the FORTRAN programming language. If a piece of complex machinery didn’t work, the man who unscrewed the casing and took a look inside might well be Gordon Moore.

      Inevitably, this led to some tensions within a matter of months. Gene Flath, who had been hired to run the company’s first fabrication line, began to find that engineers he had asked to go off and deal with a process problem would come back and announce that they had done something completely different. When he asked them why, the answer would always be the same: ‘Grove told me to do it’. When Flath confronted Grove – and confrontations inside Intel would often be with both parties screaming at the top of their lungs, in front of other people – Grove would deny that he’d given the errant engineers any direct orders. It took some time for Flath to convey to Grove that, as director of operations, he had more power than he realized. To the average engineer, a ‘suggestion’ from Grove was something to be acted on immediately. If Flath was expected to deliver on commitments he had made, this would have to stop. The philosophy inside the company that anyone could talk to anyone else was fine, Flath believed – but it had its drawbacks: ‘It’s very desirable, because you get a lot of good ideas. But it’s not OK to change the batting order without anybody decreeing that this is what would happen’.

      The company’s first year was punctuated by intermittent stand-up screaming matches while issues such as this one were gradually sorted out. But broadly, Intel people felt a refreshing sense of freedom. Instead of having to fight the bureaucracy of a purchasing department, every engineer had the authority to sign on behalf of the company for equipment costing up to $100,000. The company parking lot had no pre-assigned spaces for senior management; instead, the rule was simply that those who arrived earliest for work got the spaces closest to the front door. And as the research continued, there was a feeling that you were part of an elite corps, an assembly of the brightest, hardest-working people, a world-beating team. Of course there was a risk of failure. But everyone knew that a talented engineer could easily find work elsewhere if things didn’t work out. There was no fear of long-term unemployment to discourage risk-taking.

      ‘They offered me the job at the end of breakfast,’ said one of Intel’s very first engineering hires. ‘I called my wife, and told her that I’d just accepted a job with a pay cut of one-third, working for an unknown startup. The good news, I said, was that there were some big names running it. And if it proved a mistake, I could always go and pump gas some place.’

      Of the three memory technologies that Moore wanted to investigate, one swiftly ruled itself out. An early look at multichip memory modules suggested that it was too far from becoming a commercial product to be worth devoting effort to. That left the bipolar route and the MOS route. By the fall, Intel’s engineering effort was clearly organized into two terms, each led by a former Fairchild research engineer, to follow these up separately. The MOS team was led by Les Vadasz, a balding, short-tempered engineer who shared Andy Grove’s Hungarian background; the bipolar team came under the control of a brilliant but equally short-tempered engineer called Dick Bohn.

      From the very first there was friendly rivalry between the two teams to see who could deliver a manufacturable product and a stable process first. The bipolar team had an early psychological boost when Phil Spiegel arrived from Honeywell, an East Coast computer company that was one of the ‘seven dwarfs’ competing against IBM to sell mainframe computers. Spiegel explained that Honeywell wanted to steal a march on its competitors by being the first computer manufacturer to build a machine that used semiconductor memory instead of magnetic core. He knew that Fairchild had come very close to developing a bipolar memory circuit with sixteen cells, or bits. Yet Fairchild had never quite managed it, because somehow one of the cells was always a dud. Insiders used to joke that Fairchild’s R&D people had built a great 15-bit memory chip.

      Spiegel explained to the people at Intel that Honeywell wanted to be able to ship a new line of computers in 1969 or 1970 that would contain a 64-bit scratchpad memory, big enough to store an eight-letter English word. The company was inviting a number of firms in the electronics business to try to build some working prototypes to this testing specification. Intel was new and untried, but Noyce and Moore’s pedigrees were impressive. If Honeywell could give Intel a downpayment of $10,000 to help fund its research work, was the company interested in trying to beat the other six companies that had already started on the problem?

      The offer was less crazy than it sounded. Whichever company came up with a mass-produced chip first was likely to win an order from Honeywell for 10,000 units at $100 apiece. So the up-front fee, although crucially important for a startup that had to keep an eye on its bank balance, represented a bet that only represented 1% of what Honeywell was expecting the finished chips to cost. Since it was by no means clear that anyone could build a 64-bit semiconductor memory circuit, the $10,000 was a small price to pay for adding one more talented team to the field already competing for the prize. Anyway, one of Intel’s engineers had impressed Spiegel and his colleagues as particularly committed and reassuring: H. T. Chua, a Stanford graduate of Chinese ancestry who had immigrated to the US from Singapore. Chua was a quiet, thoughtful man, but he had a air of unmistakable quiet confidence about him which seemed to exude the message: We’ll build your chip for you, and we’ll beat everyone else too.

      Chua kept his promise. When Spiegel returned to California in the spring of 1969, Chua met him at the factory door with a sample chip in his hand. The chip designed for Honeywell therefore became the new company’s first commercial product. It was a symptom of Intel’s target market that the new chip wasn’t even given a name. Instead, it was referred to only by a part number, 3101. Intel’s potential customers were engineers inside computer companies, who thought of themselves as rational decision-makers choosing between one part and another strictly on technical merit, quality and price. A catchy name wouldn’t have increased sales; on the contrary, it might have excited suspicion that there was a shortage of engineering talent to cover up for. A simple part number, preferably a number that meant something, was what Intel needed to go for.

      Bob Graham, Intel’s marketing chief, realized the success of the 3101 could be of enormous value to Intel. The industry was littered with companies that made grand promises which they failed to fulfil. Cynics used to joke that National Semiconductor, in particular, used to send around a specification for a new chip to customers, and then wait to see what reaction it got before deciding whether to start designing it. Graham wanted Intel to earn the opposite reputation, so he coined the slogan INTEL DELIVERS. It became almost an unbreakable rule inside Intel never to announce a product in advance, just in case something went wrong ‘twixt cup and lip. Instead, he resolved that the company would wait until chips were already on distributors’ shelves before going out to customers to spread the word about a new device.

      This early triumph from the bipolar team cranked up the pressure on the competing MOS team to deliver. At one point Vadasz and his colleagues became convinced that they were almost there. The test production line they had set up yielded one device that worked perfectly. The MOS team immediately toasted its arrival