Ann Bowers wrote in her 1978 Christmas letter that “all of this [recognition] has made [Noyce] much in demand as a speaker. He seems to be a model of entrepreneurial endeavor.” The National Association of Manufacturers recognized his “distinguished contribution to the well-being of mankind through scientific research and development.” He also received a Corporate Leadership Award from MIT and keynoted the Institute’s alumni conference on “the management of innovation.” He began the talk with a description of his own career choices, which he claimed had never been particularly daring. “The entrepreneur as a pin-striped John Wayne blazing economic frontiers is a Hollywood myth,” he said. “There is risk [in entrepreneurship], but it is usually a calculated risk, and what you leave behind is not usually worth looking over your shoulder for.” When he left Shockley for Fairchild or Fairchild for Intel, he said, “The only risk was that I wouldn’t meet the goals I had set myself. I always knew I could go out and get a job.” This is a slightly revisionist version of his thoughts—he had never worried about getting another job; he had simply assumed he would not fail—but perhaps the young Noyce seemed a bit too brazenly self-confident from the perspective of his 50-year-old self. At the end of his talk, Noyce emphasized that “innovation feeds on success” and suggested that the best way to encourage innovation is “to be confident of success and to reward it generously.” He cited Intel’s stock-option plan as an example of this philosophy in action.35
By the early 1980s, Noyce had been featured in Business Week, the Economist, Forbes, Fortune, National Geographic, the New York Times, Time, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as many electronics-related publications. Noyce’s story was the paradigmatic tale of high-tech industry and of Silicon Valley in the eyes of many. The title of Tom Wolfe’s 1983 Esquire profile of Noyce, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce: How the Sun Rose on Silicon Valley,” might have been a bit more openly hagiographic than some of the other articles, but it captures their general tone. In November 1983, the town of Grinnell declared “Robert Norton Noyce Day.” The proclamation described Noyce as “a man from Grinnell who has gone on to high professional accomplishment and enterprise but who has never forgotten the upbringing and education he received here.” When Noyce was asked how he felt about being known as “the father of Silicon Valley,” he ducked his head, grinned, and answered, “a little humble, a little proud. What can I say? I love the term.”36
When San Francisco Chronicle reporter Herb Caen admitted in 1979 that he “had let another year go by without learning what a semiconductor is,” his readers wrote to him, not to describe the device or the physics behind it, but to describe Noyce. “Several people hasten to tell me about Robert Noyce of Los Altos, who not only pioneered the blamed thing [the integrated circuit], he founded Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel Corp. ($600 million in ten years) and, to boot, is a pilot and champion skier. Not only that! He has just become one of only 130 people in U.S. history to receive the National Science Medal. … Sure.” Caen’s readers, in other words, thought Noyce was all the layman needed to know about semiconductors. And Caen thought he sounded too good to be true.37
And in fact, Noyce’s public success and accolades were once again shadowed by personal difficulties. Two of his children, now young adults, were struggling with drug problems. In 1976, one of the young Noyces was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and hospitalized. A few months later, one of Noyce’s daughters was hit by a car while walking across a street near Noyce’s home. She lay in a coma for six weeks with an open head injury. Rehabilitation was slow and difficult.
Aside from an initial flare of anger, during which he mercilessly grilled one of his children’s doctors on his credentials, Noyce dealt with the crises using the same strangely passive denial tactics that had enabled him to weather his early difficulties with Betty. “He absolutely did not want to connect on anything that was emotionally difficult,” recalls Ann Bowers, who says that during this period she found herself sympathizing with Betty Noyce for the only time in her life. Noyce’s behavior when Bowers wanted to talk with him about the family’s problems reminded her of a toddler sticking his fingers in his ears and singing, “I can’t hear you.” He would disappear for hours into the basement or onto the tennis court behind their house. It got to the point that Bowers found herself trying to trap him—in the car, or at a restaurant—so he might be forced to bring his creativity, influence, and brainpower to bear on the situation.
But if life got too tense at home, Noyce would leave town. There was always a speech that could be given, a customer who needed wooing, a sales meeting that required inspiration, or an interview that might be granted. “My father was good at everything,” one of his daughters once said, “except, maybe, human interaction.”38
Betty Noyce was no more willing than Bob to become involved. At one crisis point she explained that she would not cancel a scheduled vacation to the Bahamas because “[the ill person] is in the hospital, so what good would I do anyway?” It fell to Noyce’s healthy adult children and Ann Bowers to find the best treatment programs and therapists and to confer with school officials, doctors, and other medical experts.
Noyce found it emotionally impossible to cope with the pain that his children were suffering. He no doubt felt at least partially responsible for it. Their troubles seemed to confirm his fear that the wages of his sins would be visited upon his children. In 1979, Noyce was invited to dinner at the home of an entrepreneur whose company the Callanish Fund had supported. After the dishes had been cleared and the children sent to bed, Noyce listened as the company founder explained that some day, if the business did well, he would like to move his family into a bigger, nicer house. Noyce looked up at him and said very quietly, “You’ve got a nice family. I screwed up mine. Just stay where you are.” Twenty-five years and a successful company later, the entrepreneur has not moved.39
PUBLIC RELATIONS CONSULTANT Regis McKenna insists that Noyce did not actively seek opportunities to promote himself, that Noyce considered granting interviews and garnering publicity to be part of his job at Intel. It does appear that Noyce had little interest in fame. While others resented, on his behalf, that he had to share credit for the integrated circuit with TI’s Jack Kilby, Noyce never had a problem with it. When Leo Esaki won the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his work on the tunnel diode, Noyce apparently told no one that he, too, had conceived of the device, and at the same time as Esaki. When, a decade later, Noyce did mention his tunnel diode work, he dismissed it with “I didn’t miss much [by not publishing my research]; the work had already been done elsewhere.”
Whether or not Noyce wanted to occupy the center of the Intel spotlight, one man sorely resented his apparently permanent claim to it. Shortly after his New York Times profile appeared, Noyce called Regis McKenna. “Andy [Grove] feels like Gordon and I get all the credit [for Intel],” Noyce said, sounding a little worried. “We have got to make Andy more visible, and we’ve got to give him more credit.” McKenna called the reporter who wrote the Times profile of Noyce. Grove, McKenna pointed out, had an outstanding story of his own. His was the much-cherished tale of an immigrant who comes to America and through education and diligent self-application, rises to business success. Six months after the Noyce profile appeared, the same reporter wrote a half-page feature article on Grove, Intel’s “high technology jelly bean ace,” for the Sunday New York Times. “That article launched Andy,” McKenna recalls with satisfaction.40
Noyce may not have actively pursued public accolades and attention, but he thoroughly enjoyed them. “He liked being looked at and being the center of attention,” explains Ann Bowers. “There was a showoff side to Bob.” Almost anyone who knew Noyce well has a story of him deliberately drawing attention to himself. Charlie Sporck recalls Noyce putting on “a hell of a diving show” at a hotel pool. Richard Hodgson remembers that Noyce once insisted on wearing a bright yellow jacket—which commemorated his having downhill skied some 100,000 feet in deep powder—throughout a luncheon at Ho
dgson’s home. Later Noyce admitted that although he had almost overheated, he had noticed another guest wearing a jacket from a successful climb of K2 (the second highest peak in the world). Noyce said that he “was not going to have a K2 jacket take precedence over a hundred-thousand-foot [jacket].” Jim Lafferty, Noyce’s sometime flight instructor said simply, “He liked being special at everything he did.”41
Harry Sello, a Fairchild employee who hosted a public television show called This Week in Science, recalls the day in the late 1960s when he invited Noyce to appear as his guest on the show. Sello had planned to have Noyce look at a transistor through a microscope while he, Sello, looked through another microscope and described what they were seeing for viewers, who could see the magnified image on their screens. Events transpired differently, however:
[Noyce] walked over and he stepped in front of me. And I’m the damn lead on the show! He cut my lines. He upstaged me all over the place. He said, “Let me show it to you,” and all of a sudden Noyce’s voice comes on and we’re looking at the same [microscopic] pictures [while] he explains it. After he looked up, I made a crack about, “Do you see why he’s president of the organization and I’m not?” He burst out laughing.
Sello stressed that Noyce did not deliberately steal the limelight. “That’s just how he was.”42
When Tom Wolfe’s glowing Esquire article appeared, Noyce was impressed that Wolfe “got it pretty much right,” despite having spoken to him only for a few minutes. Noyce sent a copy of the article to his mother, who promptly wrote to her sisters-in-law, “Tom Wolfe of The Right Stuff book chose to write up Bob and the miracle chip. He [Bob] was given twenty pages, and Jackie Onassis [profiled in the same issue] got two pages by another, dull, author.” Several people at Intel honored the publication of the Wolfe article with a “pictorial salute to our man of the year.” They superimposed Noyce’s face on several risqué pictures in Playgirl magazine and captioned every image with one or another of Wolfe’s most histrionic lines—“He seemed to enjoy finding new ways to hang his hide over the edge” or “Hey, it’s your ass.” Then they gave the magazine to Noyce. He loved it.43
NOYCE’S PUBLIC IMAGE was particularly compelling for a nation just beginning to emerge from the difficult years of the 1970s. The OPEC oil embargo and ensuing energy crisis in the middle of the decade were followed by double-digit inflation and a combination of high prices and record mortgage rates that put homeownership beyond the means of many. In November 1979, 70 American embassy employees were taken hostage in Iran and held for 444 days.
Against this bleak backdrop, Noyce and the semiconductor-based, high-technology economy of Silicon Valley shone like beacons. While other sectors suffered, worldwide electronics sales increased at an annual rate of 15 percent between 1968 and 1978, to a whopping $140 billion. Some experts predicted sales of $500 billion by 1988. Semiconductors did even better, growing at an estimated 18 percent annual rate. While more than 1.5 million American manufacturing workers lost their jobs, high technology employment in the San Francisco Bay Area grew 77 percent from 1974 to 1980, with Santa Clara County (the county whose boundaries most closely match those of Silicon Valley), gaining an impressive 83,000 jobs in the sector. In 1979, the “help wanted” section of the San Jose Mercury News listed more than 60 pages of advertisements for technical personnel. Per capita personal income growth in Santa Clara County outpaced the rest of California by more than 10 percent.44
According to some calculations, Silicon Valley produced more millionaires in the decade of the 1970s than anywhere else in the country at any time in history. Between 1975 and 1983, more than 1,000 companies—some of them fantastically successful—were launched in Silicon Valley. In 1983, the chairman of the American Stock Exchange was excited enough about young high-technology firms that he told Time magazine, “If there is any hope for our economy, it rests with these people. They are the most challenging, irreverent bunch around.”45
The chairman’s comments appeared in an issue of Time whose cover featured a soft-focus picture of Apple Computer co-founder Steve Jobs under the headline, “Striking it Rich: America’s Risk Takers.” Jobs was 26 years old and worth nearly $150 million. He was the most visible member of a new generation of electronics entrepreneurs—young men (a new generation, but the dominance of men remained a constant) building companies whose products relied on semiconductor technology. Noyce once said that “small entrepreneurs depend totally upon the infrastructure that is—has been—established … so that they can use those tools, those techniques, and go off and do something specialized.” This certainly was true of Apple Computer, which was financed by men associated with Fairchild and Intel and staffed with many people from Hewlett-Packard and Intel.46
Apple had gotten its start in 1976, when 19-year-old Jobs convinced his friend Steve Wozniak, who had developed a personal computer in his garage, to start a business with him. The two showed their computer to venture capitalist Don Valentine (a former Fairchild salesman), who suggested they contact Mike Markkula, recently retired (at age 34) from his job in Intel’s marketing group. Markkula, who had long dreamed of something like a personal computer—as a teenager, he had built a “programmable electronic sliderule”—invested $91,000 in the company. In exchange, he received a one-third ownership stake in Apple.47
One of Markkula’s first calls on behalf of Apple was to Noyce. “I want you to be aware of this,” Markkula said. “I’d like to present to the [Intel] board.” Noyce gave his approval and on the appointed day, Markkula and Steve Wozniak gave a presentation about the personal computer, an Apple II on hand for demonstration purposes. “If you want to participate in this in some way, say so,” Markkula told the board. “If you don’t, fine. But this is something you should have in front of your consciousness.” Intel had not given much thought to the personal computer since Moore squelched Noyce and Gelbach’s plans to go head to head with Altair. The board listened politely and asked a few questions, but no one proposed a relationship between Intel and Apple that went beyond Intel’s possibly providing the microprocessor for Apple Computers. “Nothing else was really in Intel’s best interest,” Markkula acknowledges.48
But Arthur Rock had paid careful attention to Markkula and Wozniak’s presentation. A few days later, he called Markkula’s office. “I want to talk to these guys,” Rock said. After attending a small computer hobbyists’ convention and noticing many more people crowded around the Apple booth than any other, Rock decided to invest $60,000 in the company. He also brought in Henry Singleton of Teledyne, who invested $108,000.
In 1977, Regis McKenna, who handled Intel’s public relations, began working with Apple. He hosted a party, one of whose key objectives was to introduce Ann Bowers, who was building her consulting business, to Steve Jobs, who McKenna thought needed to hire a human-resources expert. Jobs did not make a good impression on Bowers. He was a 22-year-old, self-described “college drop in,” with a stringy beard and long hair. He attended McKenna’s dinner party in scruffy jeans, a t-shirt, Birkenstock sandals, and a morning coat. But he was interesting enough to talk to, and soon Bowers found herself engrossed in what she called “all Steve’s schemes,” only half of which she thought were even remotely feasible. Clearly this was a company that needed her help. She agreed to consult for Apple.49
A few months into her consulting work, Bowers learned that Steve Wozniak wanted to sell some of his founders’ stock for $13 a share. She bought it from him. “Bob thought I was nuts,” she recalls. Noyce did not try to stop her from investing—they had long ago agreed that she could do what she liked with her money, and he could do the same with his—but he could not take Jobs and Wozniak seriously. Even Arthur Rock admits, “Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak weren’t very appealing people in those days.” Wozniak was the telephone-era’s version of a hacker—he used a small box that emitted electronic tones to call around the world for free—and Steve Jobs’s ungroomed appearance was offputting to Noyce. In his day, Noyce, too, had worked
outside the corporate mainstream, with his company hopping and his attempts to democratize Fairchild’s corporate culture. But even Noyce, who had dared to wear shirt sleeves in the office, wore a coat and tie to meetings. He respected protocol. He always had cut his hair short, and he did not wear sandals beyond the pool deck.50
Besides, Noyce asked Bowers with perhaps a touch of jealousy, what made this hippie company worth $13 a share? Yes, Noyce was convinced that personal computers would one day be a huge market. But he was equally convinced that Jobs and Wozniak were not the men to lead that market. This was especially true after Bowers brought home her first Apple in 1978, and she and Noyce spent much of the weekend on the phone to Mike Markkula trying to set it up properly. The Apple machine did not strike Noyce as the groundbreaking technical breakthrough necessary to bring computing power to the common man.
But over time, Noyce’s feelings about Apple began to change. This was due, in no small measure, to Steve Jobs, who deliberately sought out Noyce as a mentor. (Jobs also asked Jerry Sanders and Andy Grove if he could take them to lunch every quarter and “pick your brain.”) “Steve would regularly appear at our house on his motorcycle,” Bowers recalls. “Soon he and Bob were disappearing into the basement, talking about projects.” Noyce decided Jobs was immature but extremely bright and a lot of fun. In 1979, Noyce invited Jobs to fly with him in his Seabee, a World War II era plane that could land on either water or land. After landing on a lake, Noyce pulled a wrong lever, inadvertently locking the wheels. It was not until he tried to land the plane on a runway that he realized there was a problem. Immediately upon hitting the ground, the Seabee leapt forward and nearly flipped. Jobs watched with mounting panic as Noyce furiously tried to bring the plane under control while sparks shot past the windows. “As this was happening,” Jobs recalls, “I was picturing the headline: ‘Bob Noyce and Steve Jobs Killed in Fiery Plane Crash.’ It was only due to his excellent piloting that we survived. It was really close.”51
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