Hooking Up

by Tom Wolfe

  The spirit of the start-up phase! My God! Who could forget the exhilaration of the past few years! To be young and free out here on the silicon frontier! Noyce was determined to maintain that spirit during the expansion phase. And for the time being at least, here in the early 1960s, the notion of a permanent start-up operation didn’t seem too far-fetched. Fairchild was unable to coast on the tremendous advantage Noyce’s invention of the integrated circuit had provided. Competitors were setting up shop in the Santa Clara Valley like gold rushers. And where did they come from? Why, from Fairchild itself! And how could that be? Nothing to it … Defection capital!

  Defectors (or redefectors) from Fairchild started up more than fifty companies, all making or supplying microchips. Raytheon Semiconductor, Signetics, General Microelectronics, Intersil, Advanced Micro Devices, Qualidyne—off they spun, each with a sillier pseudo-tech engineerologism for a name than the one before. Defectors! What a merry game that was. Jean Hoerni and three of the other original eight defectors from Shockley defected from Fairchild to form what would soon become known as Teledyne Semiconductors, and that was only round one. After all, why not make all the money for yourself! The urge to use defection capital was so irresistible that the word “defection,” with its note of betrayal, withered away. Defectors were merely the Fairchildren, as Adam Smith dubbed them. Occasionally defectors from other companies, such as the men from Texas Instruments and Westinghouse who started Siliconix, moved into the Santa Clara Valley to join the free-for-all. But it was the Fairchildren who turned the Santa Clara Valley into the Silicon Valley. Acre by acre the fruit trees were uprooted, and two-story Silicon Modern office buildings and factories went up. The state of California built a new freeway past the area, Route 280. Children heard the phrase “Silicon Valley” so often, they grew up thinking it was the name on the map.

  Everywhere the Fairchild émigrés went, they took the Noyce approach with them. It wasn’t enough to start up a company; you had to start up a community, a community in which there were no social distinctions, and it was first come, first served, in the parking lot, and everyone was supposed to internalize the common goals. The atmosphere of the new companies was so democratic, it startled businessmen from the East. Some fifty-five-year-old biggie with his jowls swelling up smoothly from out of his F. R. Tripler modified-spread white collar and silk jacquard-print necktie would call up from GE or RCA and say, “This is Harold B. Thatchwaite,” and the twenty-three-year-old secretary on the other end of the line, out in the Silicon Valley, would say in one of those sunny blond pale blue-eyed California voices, “Just a minute, Hal, Jack will be right with you.” And once he got to California and met this Jack for the first time, there he would be, the CEO himself, all of thirty-three years old, wearing no jacket, no necktie, just a checked shirt, khaki pants, and a pair of moccasins with welted seams the size of jumper cables. Naturally the first sounds out of this Jack’s mouth would be “Hi, Hal.”

  It was the 1960s, and people in the East were hearing a lot about California surfers, California bikers, hot-rodders, car customizers, California hippies, and political protesters, and the picture they got was of young people in jeans and T-shirts who were casual, spontaneous, impulsive, emotional, sensual, undisciplined, and obnoxiously proud of it. So these semiconductor outfits in the Silicon Valley with their CEOs dressed like camp counselors struck them as the business versions of the same thing.

  They couldn’t have been more wrong. The new breed of the Silicon Valley lived for work. They were disciplined to the point of back spasms. They worked long hours and kept working on weekends. They became absorbed in their companies the way men once had in the palmy days of the automobile industry. In the Silicon Valley a young engineer would go to work at eight in the morning, work right through lunch, leave the plant at six-thirty or seven, drive home, play with the baby for half an hour, have dinner with his wife, get in bed with her, give her a quick toss, then get up and leave her there in the dark and work at his desk for two or three hours on “a coupla things I had to bring home with me.”

  Or else he would leave the plant and decide, Well, maybe he would drop in at the Wagon Wheel for a drink before he went home. Every year there was some place, the Wagon Wheel, Chez Yvonne, Rickey’s, the Roundhouse, where members of this esoteric fraternity, the young men and women of the semiconductor industry, would head after work to have a drink and gossip and brag and trade war stories about phase jitters, phantom circuits, bubble memories, pulse trains, bounceless contacts, burst modes, leapfrog tests, p-n junctions, sleeping-sickness modes, slow-death episodes, RAMs, NAKs, MOSes, PCMs, PROMs, PROM blowers, PROM burners, PROM blasters, and teramagnitudes, meaning multiples of a million millions. So then he wouldn’t get home until nine, and the baby was asleep, and dinner was cold, and the wife was frosted off, and he would stand there and cup his hands as if making an imaginary snowball and try to explain to her … while his mind trailed off to other matters, LSIs, VLSIs, alpha flux, de-rezzing, forward biases, parasitic signals, and that terasexy little cookie from Signetics he had met at the Wagon Wheel, who understood such things.

  It was not a great way of life for marriages. By the late 1960s the toll of divorces seemed to those in the business to be as great as that of NASA’s boomtowns, Cocoa Beach, Florida, and Clear Lake, Texas, where other young engineers were giving themselves over to a new technology as if it were a religious mission. The second time around they tended to “intramarry.” They married women who worked for Silicon Valley companies and who could comprehend and even learn to live with their twenty-four-hour obsessions. In the Silicon Valley an engineer was under pressure to reinvent the integrated circuit every six months. In 1959 Noyce’s invention had made it possible to put an entire electrical circuit on a chip of silicon the size of a fingernail. By 1964 you had to know how to put ten circuits on a chip that size just to enter the game, and the stakes kept rising. Six years later the figure was one thousand circuits on a single chip; six years after that it would be thirty-two thousand—and everyone was talking about how the real breakthrough would be sixty-four thousand. Noyce himself led the race; by 1968 he had a dozen new integrated-circuit and transistor patents. And what amazing things such miniaturization made possible! In December 1968 NASA sent the first manned flight to the moon, Apollo 8. Three astronauts, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders, flew into earth orbit, then fired a rocket at precisely the right moment in order to break free of the earth’s gravitational field and fly through the minute “window” in space that would put them on course to the moon rather than into orbit around the sun, from which there could be no return. They flew to the moon, went into orbit around it, saw the dark side, which no one had ever seen, not even with a telescope, then fired a rocket at precisely the right moment in order to break free of the moon’s gravitational pull and go into the proper trajectory for their return to earth. None of it would have been possible without onboard computers. People were beginning to talk about all that the space program was doing for the computer sciences. Noyce knew it was the other way around. Only the existence of a miniature computer two feet long, one foot wide, and six inches thick—exactly three thousand times smaller than the old ENIAC and far faster and more reliable—made the flight of Apollo 8 possible. And there would have been no miniature computer without the integrated circuits invented by Noyce and Kilby and refined by Noyce and the young semiconductor zealots of the Silicon Valley, the new breed who were building the road to El Dorado.

  Noyce used to go into a slow burn that year, 1968, when the newspapers, the magazines, and the television networks got on the subject of the youth. The youth was a favorite topic in 1968. Riots broke out on the campuses as the antiwar movement reached its peak following North Vietnam’s Tet offensive. Black youths rioted in the cities. The Yippies, supposedly a coalition of hippies and campus activists, managed to sabotage the Democratic National Convention by setting off some highly televised street riots. The press seemed to enjoy presenting the
se youths as the avant-garde who were sweeping aside the politics and morals of the past and shaping America’s future. The French writer Jean-François Revel toured American campuses and called the radical youth homo novus, “the New Man,” as if they were the latest, most advanced product of human evolution itself, after the manner of the superchildren in Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

  Homo novus? As Noyce saw it, these so-called radical youth movements were shot through with a yearning for a preindustrial Arcadia. They wanted, or thought they wanted, to return to the earth and live on organic vegetables and play folk songs from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were antitechnology. They looked upon science as an instrument monopolized by the military-industrial complex. They used this phrase, “the military-industrial complex,” all the time. If industry or the military underwrote scientific research in the universities—and they underwrote a great deal of it—then that research was evil. The universities were to be pure and above exploitation, except, of course, by ideologues of the Left. The homo novus had set up a chain of logic that went as follows: since science equals the military-industrial complex, and the military-industrial complex equals capitalism, and capitalism equals fascism, therefore science equals fascism. And therefore these much-vaunted radical youths, these shapers of the future, attacked the forward positions of American technology, including the space program and the very idea of the computer. And therefore these creators of the future were what? They were Luddites. They wanted to destroy the new machines. They were the reactionaries of the new age. They were an avant-garde to the rear. They wanted to call off the future. They were stillborn, ossified, prematurely senile.

  If you wanted to talk about the creators of the future—well, here they were! Here in the Silicon Valley! Just before Apollo 8 circled the moon, Bob Noyce turned forty-one. By age forty-one he had become such a good skier, people were urging him to enter competitions. When his daughter Penny was almost fourteen, he asked her what she wanted for her birthday, and she said she wanted to drop from an airplane by parachute. Noyce managed to convince her to settle for glider lessons instead. Then, because it made him restless to just stand around an airfield and watch her soar up above, he took flying lessons, bought an airplane, and began flying the family up through the mountain passes to Aspen, Colorado, for skiing weekends. He had the same lean, powerful build as he had had twenty years before, when he was on the swimming team at Grinnell College. He had the same thick dark brown hair and the same hairline. It looked as if every hair in his head were nailed in. He looked as if he could walk out the door any time he wanted to and win another Midwest Conference diving championship. And he was one of the oldest CEOs in the semiconductor business! He was the Edison of the bunch! He was the father of the Silicon Valley!

  The rest of the hotshots were younger. It was a business dominated by people in their twenties and thirties. In the Silicon Valley there was a phenomenon known as burnout. After five or ten years of obsessive racing for the semiconductor high stakes, five or ten years of lab work, work lunches, workaholic drinks at the Wagon Wheel, and workbattering of the wife and children, an engineer would reach his middle thirties and wake up one day—and he was finished. The game was over. It was called burnout, suggesting mental and physical exhaustion brought about by overwork. But Noyce was convinced it was something else entirely. It was … age, or age and status. In the semiconductor business, research engineering was like pitching in baseball; it was 60 percent of the game. Semiconductor research was one of those highly mathematical sciences, such as microbiology, in which, for reasons one could only guess at, the great flashes, the critical moments of inspiration, came mainly to those who were young, often to men in their twenties. The thirty-five-year-old burnouts weren’t suffering from exhaustion, as Noyce saw it. They were being overwhelmed, outperformed, by the younger talent coming up behind them. It wasn’t the central nervous system that was collapsing, it was the ego.

  Now here you saw youth in the vanguard, on the leading edge! Here you saw the youths who were, in fact, shaping the future! Here you saw, if you insisted on the term, the homo novus!

  But why insist? For they were also of the same stripe as Josiah Grinnell, who had founded Grinnell., Iowa, at the age of thirty-three.

  It was in 1968 that Noyce pulled off the redefection of all redefections. Fairchild Semiconductor had generated tremendous profits for the parent company back East. It now appeared to Noyce that John Carter and Sherman Fairchild had been diverting too much of that money into new start-up ventures outside the semiconductor field. As a matter of fact, Noyce disliked many things “back East.” He disliked the periodic trips to New York, for which he dressed in gray suits, white shirts, and neckties and reported to the royal corporate court and wasted days trying to bring them up-to-date on what was happening in California. Fairchild was rather enlightened, for an Eastern corporation, but the truth was, there was no one back East who understood how to run a corporation in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Back East they had never progressed beyond the year 1940. Consequently, they were still hobbled by all the primitive stupidities of bureaucratism and labor-management battles. They didn’t have the foggiest comprehension of the Silicon Valley idea of a corporate community. The brightest young businessmen in the East were trained—most notably at Harvard Business School—to be little Machiavellian princes. Greed and strategy were all that mattered. They were trained for failure.

  Noyce and Gordon Moore, two of the three original eight Shockley elves still at Fairchild, decided to form their own company. They went to Arthur Rock, who had helped provide the start-up money for Fairchild Semiconductor when he was at Hayden Stone. Now Rock had his own venture capital operation. Noyce took great pleasure in going through none of the steps in corporate formation that the business schools talked about. He and Moore didn’t even write up a proposal. They merely told Rock what they wanted to do and put up $500,000 of their own money, $250,000 each. That seemed to impress Rock more than anything they could possibly have written down, and he rounded up $2.5 million of the start-up money. A few months later another $300,000 came, this time from Grinnell College. Noyce had been on the college’s board of trustees since 1962, and a board member had asked him to give the college a chance to invest, should the day come when he started his own company. So Grinnell College became one of the gamblers betting on Noyce and Intet—the pseudo-tech engineerologism Noyce and Moore dreamed up as the corporate name. Josiah Grinnell would have loved it.

  The defection of Noyce and Moore from Fairchild was an earthquake even within an industry jaded by the very subject of defections. In the Silicon Valley everybody had looked upon Fairchild as Noyce’s company. He was the magnet that held the place together. With Noyce gone, it was obvious that the entire workforce would be up for grabs. As one wag put it, “People were practically driving trucks over to Fairchild Semiconductor and loading up with employees.” Fairchild responded by pulling off one of the grossest raids in corporate history. One day the troops who were left at Fairchild looked across their partitions and saw a platoon of young men with terrific suntans moving into the executive office cubicles. They would always remember what terrific suntans they had. They were C. Lester Hogan, chief executive officer of the Motorola semiconductor division in Phoenix, and his top echelon of engineers and administrators. Or, rather, C. Lester Hogan of Motorola until yesterday. Fairchild had hired the whole bunch away from Motorola and installed them in place of Noyce & Co. like a matched set. There was plenty of sunshine in the Santa Clara Valley, but nobody here had suntans like this bunch from Phoenix. Fairchild had lured the leader of the young sun-gods out of the Arizona desert in the most direct way imaginable. He had offered him an absolute fortune in money and stock. Hogan received so much, the crowd at the Wagon Wheel said, that henceforth wealth in the Silicon Valley would be measured in units called hogans.

  Noyce and Moore, meanwhile, started Intel up in a tilt-up concrete building
that Jean Hoerni and his group had built but no longer used, in Santa Clara, which was near Mountain View. Once again there was an echo of Shockley. They opened up shop with a dozen bright young electrical engineers, plus a few clerical and maintenance people, and bet everything on research and product development. Noyce and Moore, like Shockley, put on the white coats and worked at the laboratory tables. They would not be competing with Fairchild or anyone else in the already established semiconductor markets. They had decided to move into the most backward area of computer technology, which was data storage, or “memory.” A computer’s memory was stored in ceramic ringlets known as cores. Each ringlet contained one “bit” of information, a “yes” or a “no,” in the logic of the binary system of mathematics that computers employ. Within two years Noyce and Moore had developed the 1103 memory chip, a chip of silicon and polysilicon the size of two letters in a line of type. Each chip contained four thousand transistors, did the work of a thousand ceramic ringlets, and did it faster. The production line still consisted of rows of women sitting at tables as in the old shed-and-rafter days, but the work bays now looked like something out of an intergalactic adventure movie. The women engraved the circuits on the silicon photographically, wearing antiseptic Mars Voyage suits, headgear, and gloves because a single speck of dust could ruin one of the miniature circuits. The circuits were so small that “miniature” no longer sounded small enough. The new word was “microminiature.” Everything now took place in an air-conditioned ice cube of vinyl tiles, stainless steel, fluorescent lighting, and backlit plastic.

  The 1103 memory chip opened up such a lucrative field that other companies, including Fairchild, fought desperately just to occupy the number-two position, filling the orders Intel couldn’t take care of. At the end of Intel’s first year in business, which had been devoted almost exclusively to research, sales totaled less than three thousand dollars and the workforce numbered forty-two. In 1972, thanks largely to the 1103 chip, sales were $23.4 million and the workforce numbered 1,002. In the next year sales almost tripled, to $66 million, and the workforce increased two and a half times, to 2,528.