Inside Intel. Tim Jackson

the deciding issue will be people. And it is people, not technologies or strategies, who are the focus of this book. Its aim is to offer an account of Intel’s story as seen through the eyes of dozens of different employees, from the most junior to the most senior. The lives of these people don’t add up to a comprehensive history of the company. Since the company has always refused to cooperate with outsiders attempting to tell its story from an independent standpoint, that may have to wait for many years until the secrets of Intel’s current operations are no longer of commercial value. Instead, the intention here is to give a glimpse of life inside Intel – and in doing so to say something about one of the most extraordinary and most ruthlessly successful businesses in history.

PART I

       INNOVATION

      ‘We are really the revolutionaries in the world today – not the kids with the long hair and beards who were wrecking the schools a few years ago.’

      GORDON MOORE, Intel founder,

      quoted in Fortune magazine

1

       The Odds-On Favourite

      YOU PROBABLY THINK you can skip this chapter.

      The scene is already in your mind. It’s late at night, and the garage is entirely dark except for the pool of light cast on the workbench by a low-cost anglepoise lamp. The future billionaire is hunched over the computer, oblivious to the clutter of empty pizza boxes around him, absorbed in his work. His hair is unwashed, and he’s been wearing the same grimy T-shirt almost every day since he dropped out of college. He has few contacts and no backers. His only assets are his technical skills and the brilliant powers of persuasion and negotiation that will blossom over the years to come.

      There’s probably no single company that conforms to every one of these stereotypes. But most of America’s most successful technology companies display at least some of them: modest beginnings, fighting against the odds, brilliant ideas that go against conventional wisdom, founders who are outsiders and have nothing to lose if they fail. Look at Steve Jobs and Apple, or Bill Gates and Microsoft. These are the models that we’ve come to think of as the ways to start a successful high-tech company.

      The creation of Intel Corporation in 1968 was quite different.

      Instead of being young and rebellious, its two founders were middle-aged and respectable. Instead of being poor and isolated, they were prosperous and known already as leading figures in their industry. Instead of labouring for months or even years to find a backer for their venture, they rounded up $2.3m of funding in an afternoon, on the basis of a couple of sheets of paper containing one of the sketchiest business plans ever financed.

      The two most important words of the business plan were Robert Noyce. Forty years old, Noyce was the general manager of Fairchild Semiconductor, one of the most prominent businesses in the Bay Area to the south of San Francisco. But he was more than that: he was one of the creators of the integrated circuit.

      To understand the significance of this, you have to remember that the earliest computers used vacuum tubes as the basic elements of their circuits. Vacuum tubes, working like small-sized light bulbs, were bulky and unreliable – and since they had to be heated before they could work properly, they were also gluttonous consumers of electricity. A large computer could easily be big enough to require its own little power station – and its vacuum tubes pumped out enough heat to turn a massive room into an oven.

      The building-block of today’s electronics industry is a miniature switch that takes advantage of the fact that certain crystals, such as silicon, sometimes conduct electricity and sometimes don’t. This switch, dubbed a ‘transistor’, earned a Nobel Prize for the three physicists at Bell Labs who discovered it in 1948. The early transistors were smaller, and needed no heating element to make them work. Moreover, unlike a light bulb they didn’t need to be changed every so often. But they shared one of the drawbacks of the vacuum tube: to build a computer, you had to connect them one by one into electrical circuits.

      Bob Noyce’s claim to fame was making it possible to put more than one transistor on to the same fragment of silicon. The circuits built using this technique became known as ‘integrated circuits’. Coincidentally, two different teams in different companies 2,000 miles apart conceived the integrated circuit almost simultaneously in 1959. The winner of the first integrated-circuit patent was Jack Kilby, an engineer at Texas Instruments. But it was Noyce and his colleagues at Fairchild Semiconductor who succeeded in turning the integrated circuit from a laboratory prototype into a product that could be mass produced in ever-increasing numbers and ever-falling prices – and Noyce who had made it possible for engineers to dream of myriad new products that had never before been possible.

      Noyce did not fit the stereotype of the inventor. He was gregarious, charming, athletic and handsome. Brought up in Grinnell, a small town in Iowa where his father was a Congregational minister, he was a boy scout who went to Sunday school every week and graduated valedictorian at the local high school. His entry in the school’s year book described him as the Quiz Kid, ‘the guy who has the answers to all the questions’, who played in the school band, sang in its chorus, was a leading light of the Latin and science clubs, and acted in six plays. At college, he was the swimming team’s best diver, and took the lead in a radio soap opera. The sole cloud over his exemplary youth, which formed the centrepiece of a profile of Noyce that Tom Wolfe wrote for Esquire in 1983, was an incident at college when he and a fellow-student stole a twenty-five-pound suckling pig for a Hawaiian barbecue on campus. People took pigs seriously in the Iowa farm belt. But it was a sign of the charmed life that Noyce seemed to lead that not even an offence of this gravity could spoil his career. An admiring physics teacher talked the college authorities out of expelling him. Instead, he was sent off to work at an insurance company for a few months, and then after his graduation to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his PhD.

      More than two decades later Bob Noyce had become general manager at Fairchild and chairman of the board of trustees of his old college in Iowa – but he was still everybody’s best friend. He had a way of looking at you that made it clear that he took what you said very, very seriously, and a way of talking in his gravelly, deep voice, usually waiting until everyone else had weighed in first, that made you take what he said more seriously still. He had what Wolfe described as the ‘halo effect’. (‘People who have it seem to know just what they are doing; they make you see their halo.’) He was not only a born leader; he was also an inspiration.

      Gordon Moore, reporting to Noyce at Fairchild Semiconductor as head of research and development, was a very different personality. While Noyce was five foot eight and dark-haired, Moore was over six feet and balding. While Noyce was the life and soul of every party – drinking, singing, playing tricks and accepting every dare offered to him – Moore would sit with a few close friends, quietly talking around a table. His temper was a model of equanimity, and his two great passions were fishing and messing around in boats. He was born in the small coastal town of Pescadero, just thirty miles south of San Francisco, where his father was deputy sheriff of the county. If you bumped into him walking out of his local hardware store on a Saturday morning, which people often did, you’d find him in a pair of worn overalls, peering down at his solid work boots through his wire-framed glasses. You might easily have mistaken him for a modestly prosperous orchard farmer, out in his pick-up to buy something he needed to fix a leaking pipe or to put up a swing for the kids on the apple tree in the back yard.

      But Moore was every bit as great an engineer as Noyce. His PhD, in chemical engineering, was from Caltech, the prestigious California Institute of Technology near Pasadena. He was the winner of a number of important patents. And he had an uncanny knack for solving technical problems. If you took a problem that looked as though it had five or six routes to a possible solution, most engineers would waste a lot of