The Man Behind the Microchip

by Leslie Berlin

  NOYCE BEGAN TO GARNER ATTENTION from the general press in the early 1970s, when journalists started writing about California’s “Silicon Valley.” The name, which had first appeared in January 1971, in an Electronic News article, was far from ubiquitous, but whether the cluster of electronics firms on the San Francisco Peninsula was called “Silicon Valley,” “Semiconductor Country,” “California’s Route 128,” or “California’s great breeding ground for industry,” the national business press was beginning to take notice of it and of Noyce. In the early 1970s, Business Week and Fortune articles on the Peninsula’s semiconductor companies prominently featured Intel, and by extension, Noyce and Moore.20

  Noyce’s speaking schedule also began to reflect a more general sort of attention. Most of his speeches were addressed to technical gatherings or analysts who specialized in the semiconductor industry, but he also keynoted a conference on innovation and shared a stage at the Iowa Academy of Science with Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Explosion. Whenever he had the opportunity, Noyce talked about the microprocessor. Most of the devices were still used only in traffic lights, elevators, butcher scales, and other relatively rudimentary control functions, but in 1973 Noyce predicted that of all the electronics technology available anywhere in the world, “the thing that we will see make the most difference will be the extension of the microcomputer [microprocessor] into just about everything.” Two years before, he had been even more specific about how the microprocessor would change things: “Control gadgetry of the future will permit a housewife to tell her oven to cook a roast rare rather than at a specific temperature—and it will. The motorist will direct his auto to travel at 55 miles an hour. A subscriber will remind his telephone he will be at the neighbors and calls will be transferred there.” His son, after hearing one speech at MIT in 1973, said his father was most animated “when he got to predictions of new market areas: cars, calculators, watches, telephones.” After the talk, Bill wrote to his sisters, “[Da and I] stayed up till about midnight talking about such things as Fermat’s last theorem.”21

  All in all, Noyce cut a rather dashing figure, especially for a press used to less charisma from the technical sector. Reported one particularly fawning account: “Dr. Noyce finds time for skiing at Squaw Valley and sailing off the Maine Coast. ‘We have six boats—if you want to count the row boat—one for each member of the family,’ he says.” In a similar vein came this comment from a newspaper aimed at engineers and managers in the electronics industry: “In many ways, Dr. Robert N. Noyce is just what every parent hopes his technically talented son will become: a thoroughly nice guy, technically brilliant (he holds more than a dozen patents), who raises four bright kids and becomes a success in business.”22

  Much was cracking beneath the veneer of unqualified success, however. Microma, Intel’s digital-watch acquisition, was proving problematic, less for technical reasons than for its forcing Intel to contend with a commercial product for the first time. Noyce, Moore, Gelbach, and Grove found themselves discussing not yields and bits but gift boxes, watch bands, store displays, and jewelers’ kits. Radio Shack put out a digital watch under the name Micronta, which confused customers. And the watches themselves were far from reliable. The Board of Directors meetings began by collecting those of the directors’ watches that needed to be repaired. Even Noyce’s brother Don, who was thrilled by the prospect of seeing his first digital watch, privately told his children that the display on “Uncle Bob’s new kind of watch” was almost impossible to read.23

  Closer to home, Penny had been hospitalized for asthma attacks so severe she landed in the intensive care ward. (Bob and Betty, unable to break their two-pack-a-day habits, refrained from smoking in her bedroom.) Her father was so worried about her, Penny wrote in 1972, that “I’m convinced that if I made the simplest request, a motorcade of Intel underlings would arrive at utmost speed.” One of Noyce’s planes, a twin-engine Cessna that he enrolled in a small charter service at the San Jose airport, crashed in Nevada and killed all four men who had been leasing it for the day. Noyce was not at fault, but he sold the plane shortly after it was returned to him.24

  Moreover, the general tenor of the youth movement sweeping the United States made Noyce uneasy. Bill was growing his hair to his shoulders, and his letters from college referred to spending the night with his girlfriend. The Vietnam War had cast a shadow over the image of the once-glamorous technical industries. For Noyce, who was accustomed to people considering his work “worthwhile and important,” this change was difficult. During and immediately after the war, Noyce later recalled, technology suddenly became an evil thing that “made napalm, burned babies, and polluted the environment.” At his talk with Ehrlich, for example, Noyce had been angry and hurt to realize that most of the students in the audience considered himself and his colleagues in technology-based industries “bad people.” He explained a few years later, “That’s what scared me. [We were] bad compared to Paul Ehrlich, who was essentially arguing we should have zero progress from here on out. … How ridiculous can you be?”25

  “I think my father really lost his compass [in the 1970s],” Penny Noyce has said. “It was a time of such change everywhere, such liberalization, such a relaxing of rules.” Ten years later, Noyce said of this period in his life, “I didn’t like myself the way I was.” He said that he tried to “switch” by, among other unspecified things, growing a Gelbach-style mustache, but “it didn’t help at all.”26

  Betty had begun spending more and more time on the East Coast, no longer returning to California when the school year began. Instead, she would stay in Maine from the end of May through the end of October. She felt that Bob’s work and Intel’s rising star further chained her to the second-class status of “Mrs. Robert Noyce” in California. She might have dealt with this by following some of her friends who were taking tentative steps into employment outside the home. Eugene Kleiner’s wife Rose was heading back to school for a graduate degree. But Betty felt very strongly that “only bad mothers weren’t home for their children.” She would never have strayed from her own expectations of her proper place.27

  A second alternative for Betty Noyce might have been to adopt the attitude assumed by many of the wives of senior Intel executives. Judy Vadasz said of the early years of Intel, “It was kind of like the war effort. You stayed home and did your thing so the warriors could go and build a temple.” Judy Vadasz, Eva Grove, and other young “Intel wives” shared common ground in their young children, frequently absent husbands, and new-found wealth. They would often get together during the day, but they rarely complained to each other about their role in the Intel “war effort.” They saw themselves as “a part of something big,” Vadasz said. “Your part was, I guess, sacrificing your husband, your kid’s father.”28

  Betty Noyce, however, had little in common with these women. She was a decade their senior. Her children were leaving the house, not starting elementary school. She had already been through the instant-wealth phenomenon. Moreover, she most definitely would not have found solace in the image of tending the hearth while Bob fought the battles. “There was too much executive ability in my family,” explained Penny Noyce. “[My mother] was good at bossing people around and organizing them.” Betty’s friends were people whom she had known for decades, back when Bob was “just another husband always carrying a briefcase,” as one confidante described him. These friends tended to view Bob as “a normal human being and not a genius” and Betty as a bit of a whirling dervish, always doing everything at a level far beyond the necessary. When the public television station held an auction, Betty wrote the catalog copy in beautiful, literate prose that took her hours to compose. Her needlepoint and quilts had become increasingly elaborate and detailed—several would eventually hang in a museum. She was, nonetheless, miserable in Bob’s shadow in California. She often found herself yelling or crying as the days passed.29

  She had long suspected Noyce was having a serious affair. When she and Bob we
nt out together, the tension between them was palpable. It was not uncommon for each of them to go through an entire pack of cigarettes after dinner. Their refusal to accommodate their differences was astonishing. Betty thought her husband’s need for stimulation and change bordered on pathological. He either had so little regard for or paid so little attention to her love of things old and traditional that he gave her a birthday gift of a bright orange and very high-tech Mazda rotary car—one of the first to come off the line. She, of course, hated it. He, in turn, was angered by her rejection.30

  About this time, Noyce and a friend took a walk alone after eating dinner with Noyce’s family. Staring straight ahead, Noyce said, almost to himself, “Boy, sometimes it’s simpler to get on a plane to New York than to come home.” He later told his daughter that he used to sit in the Intel parking lot for five or ten minutes every evening, idling the motor and wishing there was somewhere he could go that was not the house on Loyola Drive.31

  He accelerated the risk in his relationship with Maness—rapidly committing “marital suicide,” as one daughter put it. He would deliberately leave items belonging to Maness’s children in his car, where Betty was almost certain to find them. In the spring of 1973, Noyce went out to dinner–Betty was in Maine—and instructed Maness to climb in through his open bedroom window and meet him in bed. It was here that one of his children discovered them.

  THE UNDENIABLE EVIDENCE OF BOB’S TRANSGRESSIONS and of the deplorable state of the Noyces’ marriage blew the family apart. The oldest daughters escaped to Ivy League colleges. The youngest was sent to a boarding school on the East Coast. Nineteen-year-old Bill announced his intention to marry within the year, a declaration that propelled Noyce, who clearly feared Bill would relive his own mistakes, to write an unusually heartfelt letter to his son. He told Bill not to marry to “shut out competition,” that he was looking for a security in marriage that he would never be able to find, that living together unmarried was preferable to a hasty match, that his son should feel no obligation to support his fiancée while she finished school, and that, in general, he was not sure any young person was ready for the responsibility of marriage. To which Bill, who more than 30 years later remains happily married to his teenage love, rather acidly replied, “I’m not afraid of the responsibility of marriage; is there that much you know about it that I can’t envision?”32

  In general, Noyce dealt with the crisis by giving and giving to his children, each gift soaked with guilt and an unspoken plea to forgive him. A child asked for money; he sent a check for twice the request. Another wrote, “I am overwhelmed, awed, a little frightened by the way you people keep giving me things. You don’t have to do that, you know.” Another asked that Noyce restrict his gifts to a tuition check. “I’m not ungrateful,” this child wrote. “I just want to prove to myself that I’m worth something.”33

  Betty’s reaction to Bob’s affair came in stages, which she detailed in a remarkable letter to her mother written in April 1974, but never sent. Of course she insisted that Bob end the affair, which he did, over the telephone, almost immediately. Maness was heartbroken but not too surprised. She thought Noyce had been losing interest even before they were discovered. Perhaps that was why, at least unconsciously, he had proposed such a dangerous liaison in the first place. Getting caught would simultaneously end two relationships without his actively needing to terminate either one himself.34

  Betty Noyce had consulted a divorce lawyer within days of learning about her husband’s affair. The attorney told her that he would be happy to work with her, but suggested that she first “try for a reconciliation.” Her emotions were complicated. She felt confident that Bob had ended the relationship, but she was nonetheless jealous of his memory of it, which she believed he was protecting by refusing to share details of it with her or the marriage counselor they had begun seeing. “[Bob] refuses to discuss his relationship with Barbara because he wants to cherish his reminiscences and keep her image inviolate, and because he feels it’s nobody’s business anyway,” she wrote. “[It is Bob’s] same old ‘Let’s not talk about it because I don’t want to’ lordly attitude, often expressed by his saying, ‘it’s all in the past let’s forget it’—a statement he makes in almost the same breath in which he belabors me for having been short-tempered or remiss in the culinary department, or with some such historical gripe.”

  She wrote, “I’ve swallowed my pride and postponed (and maybe cancelled) many of my own wishes in order to be both women to him.” Just a few lines later, however, she is enraged again, furious that Bob clearly thought she bore some responsibility for the affair because he felt “abandoned” and “deserted” when his family went to Maine every summer. Betty suspected that Bob felt no such thing, that “he was not really convinced that he was an innocent victim of my mistreatment but was nonetheless egotistically able to say to himself, ‘I’ll tell her that she’s to blame, if she ever catches me at it.’” She added, “He can’t see very clearly that, because his lying made him feel bad, he cherished a constant sense of grievance against me—a dissatisfaction which made my slightest shortcoming a serious flaw, to his way of thinking (flaws serving as strikes against me in his mental scoring of Barbara vs. Betty, of course!).”

  When Betty told Bob that she had scheduled another appointment with a divorce lawyer in April 1974, he grew angry. Harriet and Ralph Noyce had impressed upon their sons that “divorce was wrong—a scandal, not just a personal pain.” But very soon Noyce’s fury at the prospect of a divorce began to recede, according to Betty, who declared him “(inexplicably?) easy and affectionate in the two and a half days since [learning of the appointment].” This was, after all, what he wanted, even if he had not yet admitted it to himself.35

  While Noyce’s marriage was disintegrating and his children spinning away from him, his work life was proving to be an unqualified success. At almost precisely the moment Betty wrote to her mother, Noyce announced Intel’s first-quarter performance for 1974, which was record setting in almost every possible way. Net income for this quarter alone was equivalent to 72 percent of the total profits for the previous year. Intel was growing so quickly that 60 percent of its plant space and 70 percent of its employees had joined the company in the last year. The technical progress had been equally rapid: a silicon transistor that cost $20 when Fairchild introduced it in 1959 now could be bought (inside an 1103) for less than one-tenth of a penny. The second quarter, incredibly, would be even brighter: almost 20 percent profit margins and quarterly net income of $6.7 million.36

  In April, the stock again split three for two—bringing Noyce’s total holdings to nearly a million shares. Intel was shipping 1103s at a rate of a billion bits per month. In that same month, the company introduced the 8080, the third-generation microprocessor. It offered about ten times the performance of its predecessors and retailed for $360. Finally here was a chip powerful enough to go beyond rudimentary control functions into true computing. Digital Equipment Company (DEC) announced it would use the 8080 in its computers. Other companies had brought another 18 microprocessors to market, but by 1975 the 8080 had become the defining standard for its class in the same way that the 1103 had done for 1K semiconductor memories.37

  Back in the Noyce household, Bob and Betty muddled their way through fights and counseling sessions for more than a year after the discovery of Bob’s affair. The end came in the summer of 1974. Bob decided to spend several weeks in Maine with Betty. He may have planned to try hard for a reconciliation. Betty joined him when he flew the Audubon team to Newfoundland to gather more puffin chicks, and he in turn skipped the cliffside adventures in order to accompany Betty on a tour of the historic town of St. John’s.38

  But it was not a summer of moonlit walks or heartfelt conversation. When friends came up to visit towards the end of the summer, they entered a scene one described as “outright warfare between Bob and Betty.” The visitor recalled one night in particular: “All evening long, Betty was hammering at Bob. He was just
bowing his head and taking it, but some switch must have flipped in his mind that night, because the next morning he announced that he wanted a divorce. Betty was stunned.” The friends made a hasty exit, and Bob left with them. As quickly as he could, he returned to the safety of his Intel office.39

  Noyce knew divorce would have significant financial implications for him. Because California was a community-property state, the couple’s assets were automatically split 50-50. But determining those assets would prove a challenge. Noyce had never bothered to have an accountant draw up a personal balance sheet.

  He asked his assistant from Fairchild, Paul Hwoschinsky, to try to calculate the total value of the Noyces’ holdings. Hwoschinsky had long specialized in finance, and he possessed an unusual combination of character traits. He had an MBA from Harvard and had taught Noyce about accounting and finance when they were both at Fairchild. At the same time that he was a successful businessman, Hwoschinsky also studied yoga and was in the vanguard of New Age thinking. He would one day write a bestselling book called True Wealth to remind readers that “money is just one part of a total system that produces a feeling of well-being. The challenge is earning money to live life rather than living life to earn money.”40

  Hwoschinsky was also one of the few people who actively fought against falling under Noyce’s spell. “If you walk off a cliff, everyone else will follow you,” Hwoshinsky once told Noyce. “But I will not.” When his boss looked startled, Hwoschinsky continued, “What I’m saying to you is that your charisma is scary. Use it wisely.” Hwoschinsky suspects that Noyce asked him to determine his assets—and later, to administer the Noyce children’s trusts—precisely because he knew that Hwoschinsky could remain objective in situations that had the potential to be quite emotionally fraught.41