Contents Introduction: Artifacts Part I: The Fairchildren (1957–1968) 1. The Traitorous Eight 2. The Greatest Company That Never Was 3. Digital Diaspora Part II: Start-Up (1968–1971) 4. The Ambivalent Recruit 5. Intelligent Electronics 6. Robert Noyce: The Preacher’s Son 7. The Demon of Grinnell 8. The Pig Thief 9. A Man on the Move 10. Gordon Moore: Dr. Precision 11. A Singular Start-Up 12. The Wild West 13. Bittersweet Memories Part III: The Spirit of the Age (1972–1987) 14. Miracle in Miniature 15. The Inventor 16. A Sliver of History 17. Dealing Down 18. The Philosopher’s Chip 19. Product of the Century Part IV: The Most Important Company in the World (1988–1999) 20. Crush 21. Silicon Valley Aristocracy 22. Public Affairs 23. Consumer Fantasies 24. A Thousand Fathers 25. The Knights of Moore’s Law 26. (Over) Ambitions 27. Beatification 28. The Heart of Andrew Grove 29. Mother and Child 30. Father and Child Reunion 31. Andy in Exile 32. Freedom Fighter 33. A New Life, a New Name 34. Bylined 35. Riding a Rocket 36. For the Cause 37. East of Eden 38. Turn at the Tiller 39. Eminence 40. Crash 41. Memory Loss 42. Andy Agonistes 43. Mentoring a Legend 44. The Man of the Hour 45. Juggernaut 46. Empyrean 47. The Swimmer Part V: The Price of Success (2000–2014) 48. Family Matters 49. Inside Intel Inside 50. Wired World 51. Pentium 52. The Bug of All Bugs 53. The Endless Lawsuit 54. Mea Culpa 55. Bunny Hop 56. Running the Asylum Part VI: Aftermath 57. The Full Weight of the Law Epilogue: Roaring at the Night Appendix: A Tutorial on Technology A Note on Sources Notes Index Photographic Insert About the Author Also by Michael S. Malone Credits Copyright About the Publisher Introduction: Artifacts JANUARY 2013 — I t was a night for contradictions. After an unusual January day in which the temperature had soared to nearly 70 degrees, the evening had just begun to cool to its proper temperature when the first of the cars—Mercedes, BMWs, chauffeured Lincoln Town Cars—began to pull up to the anxious platoon of waiting valets. The well-dressed men and women slowly climbed out of the cars with the careful and unsure movements of the elderly—an unlikely sight in Silicon Valley, home of the young, quick, and infinitely confident. And as these venerable figures made their way into the entry hall, took their wineglasses from the passing trays, peered at one another’s name tags, and grinned and embraced in recognition, their sincere happiness seemed more like that of a Midwestern high-school reunion than the nervous and wary bonhomie taking place around them in the restaurants and bars of the Valley. The venue for this party—the private screening of a new PBS American Experience documentary titled Silicon Valley—was itself something of a contradiction. Built on what had once been San Francisco Bay marshland inhabited only by burrowing owls, hard by the long-forgotten site (symbolic for what was to come) of a roller-coaster manufacturer, the curved glass-and-steel building—looking like the offspring of an airport terminal and a multiplex cinema—had originally been built as the corporate headquarters of high-flying graphic computer maker Silicon Graphics Inc. But in a vivid reminder of the old Valley rule that whenever a company builds a fancy new headquarters you should short the stock, SGI had cratered— and the building, not yet filled with desks and bodies, was abandoned. And there it sat, a white elephant in the middle of a real-estate slump, until the least likely of tenants appeared: the Computer History Museum. This odd tenant had not been especially welcome upon its arrival in the Valley in 1996. For the previous twenty years, it had been the Computer Museum of Boston—a celebration of just the kind of mainframe-computing Big Iron that Silicon Valley had been founded to defeat. But the vanquished computer industry, like generations of other, human, outsiders, had come to Silicon Valley to make a fresh start—and the Valley, as always, had allowed it to earn its place. The big old computers were still there on exhibit, but largely pushed to the back, supplanted by the genius of the local companies—Intel, Apple, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Google—that now ruled the digital world. More important, though, than even the artifacts on display (because in high tech even the hottest new inventions are quickly forgotten), the Computer History Museum had found a new role in the Valley for speeches, reunions, and honors celebrating the pioneers and inventors of the digital age. And now that those founding figures, like the men and women gathered on this night, had grown stooped and gray—some of them gone forever—the museum had found its true purpose in preserving the collective memories and acquired wisdom of the industry’s pioneers . . . preserving them until future generations needed them once again. Once, that date had seemed far off. Silicon Valley had always been about the future, not the past, about what could be rather than what had been, no matter how glorious. Nobody ever got rich and famous in high tech by looking over his shoulder; rather, you built better telescopes to spot the Next Big Thing as it appeared on the horizon. You had only to walk the exhibit area at the Computer History Museum to see a middle-aged engineer excitedly describing some machine he’d worked on three decades before to a young engineer, looking bored and unimpressed. Out in the Valley, on any given Saturday, you could see lines at local junior college recycling lots dumping off tons of “obsolete” computers, printers, and other devices often little more than a couple years old. Moore’s Law, the biennial doubling of computer chip performance that had accelerated the pace of innovation and become the metronome of the modern world, was named after the grandfatherly-looking man who at this moment was making his way into the museum. Moore’s Law guaranteed that change would be so central to modern life that there would be precious little time left for nostalgia. When you are being chased by demons, your only chance of survival is to keep racing forward as fast as you can; looking back can only scare you. Worse, as Moore’s Law had been warning for a half century now, it wasn’t even enough just to go fast. Rather, you had to go faster and faster, progressing at a pace humanity had never before known, just to keep up. That unimaginable pace, from living with numbers—subscribers, transistors, bandwidth, processing speeds, mass storage—that had no precedent in human experience, was now daily life in Silicon Valley and indeed in the entire digital world. And nowhere was this pace more torturous and unforgiving than just seven miles down the road at Intel Corporation, the home of the microprocessor and Moore’s Law, the company pledged to the death to maintaining the flame of the Law. The company upon which every enterprise in Silicon Valley—and almost every human institution on the planet—now depended. And yet despite all of these forces pushing Valley life forward, this evening event represented something brand-new in the story of this restless community. Suddenly, after more than fifty years of incessantly, unrelentingly being news, Silicon Valley had finally and unexpectedly become history. It would now be studied by schoolchildren and be the subject of college courses and endless doctoral dissertations. All of that was occurring already around the world, but as anecdotes and sidebars. Now it would join the main narrative of twentieth-and twenty-first-century history. And that was the biggest contradiction of all—because that official history, certified by the most watched history program on America’s public television network, had built its tale of Silicon Valley around the story of Intel—and in particular, its charismatic cofounder, Robert Noyce—the company that was the very embodiment of living in the future and indeed had chained itself to that future. And now it would be the poster child of Silicon Valley’s past. How would Intel, one of the most valuable companies in the world, builder of the microprocessor engines that powered the global Internet economy, reconcile its endless need to drive chip technology forward at the exponential pace of Moore’s Law with this growing retrograde pull of its glorious past? There was no obvious answer, but somehow it seemed that the search for a solution to this conundrum of contradictions would begin at this overdue event on this unlikely evening. Perhaps tellingly, though almost every one of the two hundred people at the premiere were in some way connected to the story of Intel Corporation, only the handful of PR executives who were managing the event for PBS were current Intel employees, people who worked every day in the world of social networks, smartphones, and embedded controllers. Given that it was still early evening, it could only be assumed that the rest of Intel’s 6,000 employees in the Bay Area (of the 107,000 around the world) were still at the office, battling everything from the encroachments of competitors to the endless Sisyphean challenge of Moore’s Law. Even Intel’s CEO, Paul Otellini, who had over his forty years with the company worked with just about everyone in the hall—and owed his career to many of them—was missing, presumably in action. Instead, almost everyone else in attendance belonged to an older, now officially legendary, world of minicomputers, calculators, digital watches, and most of all, personal computers. For them, the Internet Age and the dot-com bubble represented the end of their careers, not the beginning—and Facebook and Twitter were phenomena they read about in their retirement, the tools and toys of their grandchildren. But even if they were no longer in the game, they had the consolation of knowing that, as the documentary was about to show, they had changed the world. They were the business heroes of the second half of the twentieth century, and their legacy was secure, unlike that of the current generation of Intel employees, who labored for a company that had dangerously and uncharacteristically misstepped with the arrival of mobile computing and was now struggling to regain ground lost both to giant unforgiving competitors like Samsung and to hot up-and-comers like ARM. For the modern Intel, unlike the historic Intel being celebrated on the screen, the jury was still out. It was these aging men and women who not only had built the most important company of the age, but arguably had shaped the form of the modern world. It had made many of them very rich—a quick mental audit of the gathering suggested a total net worth of nearly $50 billion—and many sensed that the process had now begun to make them immortal. Two of the men now being escorted by their families into the museum were already living legends. Both looked much older than anyone remembered them, and that recognition drew muffled gasps from even their old friends and workmates. Gordon Moore, the giver of the great law, now spent most of his time in Hawaii, making only occasional visits to his foundation in Palo Alto. He looked comparatively healthy—but those who knew him well also knew that this was only a recent positive turn. Scores of people from his past—from founding investor Art Rock to old lieutenants like Ed Gelbach and Ted Hoff—made their way over to shake Gordon’s hand, and with the gracious humility, like an old Sunday school teacher’s, that had always characterized him, Moore greeted each in turn. Beside Moore stood a slightly smaller man, his face showing the effects of Parkinson’s disease but radiating intensity out of proportion not just to his size and health, but to anyone else in the hall. Andy Grove, the greatest and most ferocious businessman of his generation, met each handshake—from old compatriots like Les Vadász to old competitors like Federico Faggin—with the same fiery look. Together these two men, with the help or threat of everyone else in the hall, had built Intel Corporation into the most innovative company the world had ever seen. And then through an impossible gauntlet of challenges—including on occasion their own misguided stubbornness—they had built Intel into the most valuable manufacturing company in the world. And through Intel’s products and commitment to Moore’s Law, they had made possible the consumer electronics revolution that now defined the lives of three billion people, with millions more joining every day. Humanity was now richer, healthier, smarter, and more interconnected than ever before because of what they achieved. And now humanity was beginning to recognize that fact. In this story, they were the heroes—and everyone else had been a player, and happy to have been a part of that story. And if there was pride in what they had accomplished, it was bittersweet, because everyone knew that this was not only a celebration, but perhaps a last gathering as well. Anyone who doubted that had only look at the two elder statesmen at the center of this gathering. And so as guests in turn shook hands with Moore and Grove, each understood that it might be for the very last time. Tonight would be a celebration, but it would also be a last gathering of the tribes who had built Silicon Valley. And so each fixed that handshake in mind as a final memory. Regis McKenna, the marketing guru who had led Intel into the big world and helped to devise the most influential high-tech branding program of all time, had been muttering about the flaws in the documentary, which he had already seen. “It’s not bad,” he said, “but it suffers a little from being too . . . East Coast, if you know what I mean. There’s a bit too much credit given to the government for making all of this possible. There’s too many clips of rockets.” Then, seeing Grove and Moore enter, he slipped away—to return a few minutes later, grinning but with tears in his eyes. “When I got up to Andy, he bowed and said, ‘Teacher.’ The last person who called me that was Steve Jobs.”1 Despite the bonhomie and nostalgia, there was also the unsettling sense at the