Made in the USA | The History of the Integrated Circuit
What we're going through now is a fundamental cultural shift. We're handing over more and more responsibilities for life, and our society, and civilization to our machines. Transportation, communications, health, the infrastructure of our world. We're talking about A.I. now where the robots are thinking for themselves even to the brink of consciousness.
I always want to know where’s the human going to be in the story. What's it going to be like to be human in a world where the machines now act without asking us? We've made this incredible technological jump in one human lifetime. All because of Bob Noyce and the integrated circuit. Father of Silicon Valley is a term I hear used to describe Bob. How do you feel when you hear that term? A little humble, little proud, what can I say?
A new day has dawned. The integrated circuit gives us capabilities that couldn't have been imagined just a decade ago. One question which we might ask is, “Why do people care about integrated circuits?” The integrated circuit is the most important invention in Silicon Valley history. To understand the importance integrated circuit, we need to back up and look at the vacuum tube. The very first computer at scale ran on valves. The heart of all these electronic systems had been in the vacuum tube.
Valves were big and fragile. The breakthrough? The transistor. The transistor made it much more sturdy and durable. These tiny transistors are destined to play a big part in our electronic age. The year is 1959. Bob Noyce is running a company called Fairchild Semiconductor. Initially, Fairchild was going to be a transistor company. But Bob Noyce, he had an idea for taking that solid state transistor and making it flat.
You take a sheet of silicon and then you print the circuitry on top of it, metal. It turns out you can take that and supercharge it. Reproducing it by the dozens and by the hundreds. And now we do billions. Integrated circuits now perform critical tasks in almost all areas of health care. It is in your wrist watch. Modern transportation systems. Your pocket calculator. Communication that is instantaneous and global. Automatic street lights and space shuttles. It is everywhere.
This tiny piece of silicon is revolutionizing the way we live. Fairchild gets rich making the integrated circuit. But it was just volatile. The parent company Fairchild back east didn't really support it. They were seen as a cash cow and took the money out of it. So everybody quit. Noyce leaves with Gordon Moore and Andy Grove to found Intel. Within a decade, they were being called the most important company in the world.
To understand Robert Noyce and why he was such an important historic figure, you first need to understand the boy. Growing up in Grinnell, Iowa. Son of an itinerant preacher. This was a world of tight community. I grew up in small town America, which had to be self-sufficient. If something was broke, you fixed it yourself. And he brought that to Intel.
When they started to build Intel, in addition to making integrated circuit technology, they also wanted to make a company that was like nothing that had ever existed. It was everything from saying, “There won't be any corner offices. Everyone will have the same space.” The senior executives were just in other cubicles. I remember going into Noyce's office — indistinguishable from anybody else’s. But on the wall, he had the National Medal of Science. United States’ highest civilian award.
He also believes that everyone should have a piece of the company. The idea of giving out stock options to employees, even like secretaries. That was, circa 1968, pretty radical. That just wasn't done on the east coast. The revolution of Silicon Valley is as much cultural as it is technological. You know in some senses we didn't see what the impact of the integrated circuit would be when that first came out. Its effect has been revolutionary.
- Gordon Moore is the chief scientist at Fairchild. He's asked to write an article for an electronics magazine. He sits down with a sheet of graph paper. It's...