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Founders Notes: The Man Behind The Microchip

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The Man Behind the Microchip Leslie Berlin Bob Noyce took me under his wing," Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs explains. "I was young, in my twenties. He was in his early fifties. He tried to give me the lay of the land, give me a perspective that I could only partially understand." Jobs continues, "You can't really understand what is going on now unless you understand what came before." Before Intel and Google, before Microsoft and dot-coms and Apple and Cisco and Sun and Pixar and stock-option millionaires and startup widows and billionaire venture capitalists, there was a group of eight young men—six of them with PhDs, none of them over 32—who disliked their boss and decided to start their own transistor company. It was 1957. Leading the group of eight was an Iowa-born physicist named Robert Noyce, a minister's son and former champion diver, with a doctorate from MIT and a mind so quick (and a way with the ladies so effortless) that his graduate-school friends called him "Rapid Robert." Over the next decade, Noyce managed the company, called Fairchild Semiconductor, by teaching himself business skills as he went along. In 1968, Noyce and his Fairchild co-founder Gordon Moore la

The Man Behind the Microchip Leslie Berlin Bob Noyce took me under his wing," Apple Computer founder Steve Jobs explains. "I was young, in my twenties. He was in his early fifties. He tried to give me the lay of the land, give me a perspective that I could only partially understand." Jobs continues, "You can't really understand what is going on now unless you understand what came before." Before Intel and Google, before Microsoft and dot-coms and Apple and Cisco and Sun and Pixar and stock-option millionaires and startup widows and billionaire venture capitalists, there was a group of eight…

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