by Tom Wolfe
IBM had a facility in the valley that was devoted specifically to research rather than production. Both IBM and Hewlett-Packard were trying to develop a highly esoteric and colossally expensive new device, the electronic computer. Shockley had been the first entrepreneur to come to the area to make semiconductors. After the defections his operation never got off the ground. Here in the Santa Clara Valley, that left the field to Noyce and the others at Fairchild.
Fairchild’s start-up couldn’t have come at a better time. By 1957 there was sufficient demand from manufacturers who merely wanted transistors instead of vacuum tubes, for use in radios and other machines, to justify the new operation. But it was also in 1957 that the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I. In the electronics industry the ensuing space race had the effect of coupling two new inventions—the transistor and the computer—and magnifying the importance of both.
The first American electronic computer, known as ENIAC, had been developed by the Army during the Second World War, chiefly as a means of computing artillery and bomb trajectories. The machine was a monster. It was one hundred feet long and ten feet high and required eighteen thousand vacuum tubes. The tubes generated so much heat, the temperature in the room sometimes reached 120 degrees. What the government needed was small computers that could be installed in rockets to provide automatic onboard guidance. Substituting transistors for vacuum tubes was an obvious way to cut down on the size. After Sputnik I the glamorous words in the semiconductor business were “computers” and “miniaturization.”
Other than Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild was the only semiconductor company in the Santa Clara Valley, but Texas Instruments had entered the field in Dallas, as had Motorola in Phoenix and Transitron and Raytheon in the Boston area, where a new electronics industry was starting up as MIT finally began to comprehend the new technology. These firms were all racing to refine the production of transistors to the point where they might command the market. So far refinement had not been anybody’s long suit. No tourist dropping by Fairchild, Texas Instruments, Motorola, or Transitron would have had the faintest notion he was looking in on the leading edge of the most advanced of all industries, electronics. The work bays, where the transistors were produced, looked like slightly sunnier versions of the garment sweatshops of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Here were rows of women hunched over worktables, squinting through microscopes, doing the most tedious and frustrating sort of manual labor, cutting layers of silicon apart with diamond cutters, picking little rectangles of them up with tweezers, trying to attach wires to them, dropping them, rummaging around on the floor to find them again, swearing, muttering, climbing back up to their chairs, rubbing their eyes, squinting back through the microscopes, and driving themselves crazy some more. Depending on how well the silicon or germanium had been cooked and doped, anywhere from 50 to 90 percent of the transistors would turn out to be defective even after all that, and sometimes the good ones would be the ones that fell on the floor and got ruined.
Even for a machine as simple as a radio the individual transistors had to be wired together, by hand, until you ended up with a little panel that looked like a road map of West Virginia. As for a computer—the wires inside a computer were sheer spaghetti.
Noyce had figured out a solution. But fabricating it was another matter. There was something primitive about cutting individual transistors out of sheets of silicon and then wiring them back together in various series. Why not put them all on a single piece of silicon without wires? The problem was that you would also have to carve, etch, coat, and otherwise fabricate the silicon to perform all the accompanying electrical functions as well, the functions ordinarily performed by insulators, rectifiers, resistors, and capacitors. You would have to create an entire electrical system, an entire circuit, on a little wafer or chip.
Noyce realized that he was not the only engineer thinking along these lines, but he had never even heard of Jack Kilby. Kilby was a thirty-six-year-old engineer working for Texas Instruments in Dallas. In January 1959 Noyce made his first detailed notes about a complete solid-state circuit. A month later Texas Instruments announced that Jack Kilby had invented one. Kilby’s integrated circuit, as the invention was called, was made of germanium. Six months later Noyce created a similar integrated circuit made of silicon and using a novel insulating process developed by Jean Hoerni. Noyce’s silicon device turned out to be more efficient and more practical to produce than Kilby’s and set the standard for the industry. So Noyce became known as the co-inventor of the integrated circuit. Nevertheless, Kilby had unquestionably been first. There was an ironic echo of Shockley here. Strictly speaking, Bardeen and Brattain, not Shockley, had invented the transistor, but Shockley wasn’t bashful about being known as the co-inventor. And now, eleven years later, Noyce wasn’t turning bashful, either.
Noyce knew exactly what he possessed in this integrated circuit, or microchip, as the press would call it. Noyce knew that he had discovered the road to El Dorado.
El Dorado was the vast, still-virgin terrain of electricity. Electricity was already so familiar a part of everyday life, only a few research engineers understood just how young and unexplored the terrain actually was. It had been only eighty years since Edison invented the lightbulb in 1879. It had been less than fifty years since Lee De Forest, an inventor from Council Bluffs, Iowa, had invented the vacuum tube. The vacuum tube was based on the lightbulb, but the vacuum tube opened up fields the lightbulb did not even suggest: long-distance radio and telephone communication. Over the past ten years, since Bardeen and Brattain had invented it in 1948, the transistor had become the modern replacement for the vacuum tube. And now came Kilby’s and Noyce’s integrated circuit. The integrated circuit was based on the transistor, but the integrated circuit opened up fields the transistor did not even suggest. The integrated circuit made it possible to create miniature computers, to put all the functions of the mighty ENIAC on a panel the size of a playing card. Thereby the integrated circuit opened up every field of engineering imaginable, from voyages to the moon to robots, and many fields that had never been imagined, such as electronic guidance counseling. It opened up so many fields that no one could even come up with a single name to include them all. “The second industrial revolution,” “the age of the computer,” “the microchip universe,” “the electronic grid”—none of them, not even the handy neologism “high tech,” could encompass all the implications.
The importance of the integrated circuit was certainly not lost on John Carter and Fairchild Camera back in New York. In 1959 they exercised their option to buy Fairchild Semiconductor for $3 million. The next day Noyce, Moore, Hoerni, and the other five former Shockley elves woke up rich, or richer than they had ever dreamed of being. Each received $250,000 worth of Fairchild stock.
Josiah Grinnell grew livid on the subject of alcohol. But he had nothing against money. He would have approved.
Noyce didn’t know what to make of his new wealth. He was thirty-one years old. For the past four years, ever since he had gone to work for Shockley, the semiconductor business had not seemed like a business at all but an esoteric game in which young electrical engineers competed for attaboys and the occasional round of applause after delivering a paper before the IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. It was a game supercharged by the fact that it was being played in the real world, to use a term that annoyed scientists in the universities. Someone—Arnold Beckman, Sherman Fairchild, whoever—was betting real money, and other bands of young elves, at Texas Instruments, RCA, Bell, were out there competing with you by the real world’s rules, which required that you be practical as well as brilliant. Noyce started working for Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957 for twelve thousand dollars a year. When it came to money, he had assumed that he, like his father, would always be on somebody’s payroll. Now, in 1959, when he talked to his father, he told him, “The money doesn’t seem real. It’s just a way of keeping score.”
Noyce took his family to visit h
is parents fairly often. He and Betty now had three children, Bill, Penny, and Polly, who was a year old. When they visited the folks, they went off to church on Sunday with the folks, as if it were all very much a part of their lives. In fact, Noyce had started drifting away from Congregationalism and the whole matter of churchgoing after he entered MIT. It was not a question of rejecting it. He never rejected anything about his upbringing in Grinnell. It was just that he was heading off somewhere else, down a different road.
In that respect Noyce was like a great many bright young men and women from Dissenting Protestant families in the Middle West after the Second World War. They had been raised as Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, United Brethren, whatever. They had been led through the church door and prodded toward religion, but it had never come alive for them. Sundays made their skulls feel like dried-out husks. So they slowly walked away from the church and silently, without so much as a growl of rebellion, congratulated themselves on their independence of mind and headed into another way of life. Only decades later, in most cases, would they discover how, absentmindedly, inexplicably, they had brought the old ways along for the journey nonetheless. It was as if … through some extraordinary mistake … they had been sewn into the linings of their coats!
Now that he had some money, Bob Noyce bought a bigger house. His and Betty’s fourth child, Margaret, was born in 1960, and they wanted each child to have a bedroom. But the thought of moving into any of the “best” neighborhoods in the Palo Alto area never even crossed his mind. The best neighborhoods were to be found in Atherton, in Burlingame, which was known as very social, or in the swell old sections of Palo Alto, near Stanford University. Instead, Noyce bought a California version of a French country house in Los Altos, a white stucco house with a steeply pitched roof. It was scenic up there in the hills, and cooler in the summer than it was down in the flatlands near the bay. The house had plenty of room, and he and Betty would be living a great deal better than most couples their age, but Los Altos had no social cachet and the house was not going to make House & Garden come banging on the door. No one could accuse them of being ostentatious.
John Carter appointed Noyce general manager of the entire division, Fairchild Semiconductor, which was suddenly one of the hottest new outfits in the business world. NASA chose Noyce’s integrated circuits for the first computers that astronauts would use on board their spacecraft (in the Gemini program). After that, orders poured in. In ten years Fairchild sales rose from a few thousand dollars a year to $130 million, and the number of employees rose from the original band of elves to twelve thousand. As the general manager, Noyce now had to deal with a matter Shockley had dealt with clumsily and prematurely, namely, new management techniques for this new industry.
One day John Carter came to Mountain View for a close look at Noyce’s semiconductor operation. Carter’s office in Syosset, Long Island, arranged for a limousine and chauffeur to be at his disposal while he was in California. So Carter arrived at the tilt-up concrete building in Mountain View in the back of a black Cadillac limousine with a driver in the front wearing the complete chauffeur’s uniform—the black suit, the white shirt, the black necktie, and the black visored cap. That in itself was enough to turn heads at Fairchild Semiconductor. Nobody had ever seen a limousine and a chauffeur out there before. But that wasn’t what fixed the day in everybody’s memory. It was the fact that the driver stayed out there for almost eight hours, doing nothing. He stayed out there in his uniform, with his visored hat on, in the front seat of the limousine, all day, doing nothing but waiting for a man who was somewhere inside. John Carter was inside having a terrific chief executive officer’s time for himself. He took a tour of the plant, he held conferences, he looked at figures, he nodded with satisfaction, he beamed his urbane Fifty-seventh Street Biggie CEO charm. And the driver sat out there all day engaged in the task of supporting a visored cap with his head. People started leaving their workbenches and going to the front windows just to take a look at this phenomenon. It seemed that bizarre. Here was a serf who did nothing all day but wait outside a door in order to be at the service of the haunches of his master instantly, whenever those haunches and the paunch and the jowls might decide to reappear. It wasn’t merely that this little peek at the New York—style corporate high life was unusual out here in the brown hills of the Santa Clara Valley. It was that it seemed terribly wrong.
A certain instinct Noyce had about this new industry and the people who worked in it began to take on the outlines of a concept. Corporations in the East adopted a feudal approach to organization, without even being aware of it. There were kings and lords, and there were vassals, soldiers, yeomen, and serfs, with layers of protocol and perquisites, such as the car and driver, to symbolize superiority and establish the boundary lines. Back East the CEOs had offices with carved paneling, fake fireplaces, escritoires, bergères, leather-bound books, and dressing rooms, like a suite in a baronial manor house. Fairchild Semiconductor needed a strict operating structure, particularly in this period of rapid growth, but it did not need a social structure. In fact, nothing could be worse. Noyce realized how much he detested the Eastern corporate system of class and status with its endless gradations, topped off by the CEOs and vice-presidents who conducted their daily lives as if they were a corporate court and aristocracy. He rejected the idea of a social hierarchy at Fairchild.
Not only would there be no limousines and chauffeurs, there would not even be any reserved parking places. Work began at 8 a.m. for one and all, and it would be first come, first served, in the parking lot, for Noyce, Gordon Moore, Jean Hoerni, and everybody else. “If you come late,” Noyce liked to say, “you just have to park in the back forty.” And there would be no baronial office suites. The glorified warehouse on Charleston Road was divided into work bays and a couple of rows of cramped office cubicles. The cubicles were never improved. The decor remained Glorified Warehouse, and the doors were always open. Half the time Noyce, the chief administrator, was out in the laboratory anyway, wearing his white lab coat. Noyce came to work in a coat and tie, but soon the jacket and the tie were off, and that was fine for any other man in the place, too. There were no rules of dress at all, except for some unwritten ones. Dress should be modest, modest in the social as well as the moral sense. At Fairchild there were no hard-worsted double-breasted pinstripe suits and shepherd’s-check neckties. Sharp, elegant, fashionable, or alluring dress was a social blunder. Shabbiness was not a sin. Ostentation was.
During the start-up phase at Fairchild Semiconductor there had been no sense of bosses and employees. There had been only a common sense of struggle out on a frontier. Everyone had internalized the goals of the venture. They didn’t need exhortations from superiors. Besides, everyone had been so young! Noyce, the administrator or chief coordinator, or whatever he should be called, had been just about the oldest person on the premises, and he had been barely thirty. And now, in the early 1960s, thanks to his athletic build and his dark brown hair with the Campus Kid hairline, he still looked very young. As Fairchild expanded, Noyce didn’t even bother trying to find “experienced management personnel.” Out here in California, in the semiconductor industry, they didn’t exist. Instead, he recruited engineers right out of the colleges and graduate schools and gave them major responsibilities right off the bat. There was no “staff,” no “top management” other than the eight partners themselves. Major decisions were not bucked up a chain of command. Noyce held weekly meetings of people from all parts of the operation, and whatever had to be worked out was worked out right there in the room. Noyce wanted them all to keep internalizing the company’s goals and to provide their own motivations, just as they had during the start-up phase. If they did that, they would have the capacity to make their own decisions.
The young engineers who came to work for Fairchild could scarcely believe how much responsibility was suddenly thrust upon them. Some twenty-four-year-old just out of graduate school would find himself
in charge of a major project with no one looking over his shoulder. A problem would come up, and he couldn’t stand it, and he would go to Noyce and hyperventilate and ask him what to do. And Noyce would lower his head, turn on his 100-ampere eyes, listen, and say, “Look, here are your guidelines. You’ve got to consider A, you’ve got to consider B, and you’ve got to consider C.” Then he would turn on the Gary Cooper smile: “But if you think I’m going to make your decision for you, you’re mistaken. Hey … it’s your ass.”
Back East, in the conventional corporation, any functionary wishing to make an unusually large purchase had to have the approval of a superior or two or three superiors or even a committee, a procedure that ate up days, weeks, in paperwork. Noyce turned that around. At Fairchild any engineer, even a weenie just out of Caltech, could make any purchase he wanted, no matter how enormous, unless someone else objected strongly enough to try to stop it. Noyce called this the Short Circuit Paper Route. There was only one piece of paper involved, the piece of paper the engineer handed somebody in the purchasing department.