Biography | Craig Barrett — The May Morning This Hall Made Him Intel's Fourth Chief Executive

On 26 March 1998 Intel told the press that its board planned to elect Craig R. Barrett chief executive.

The title did not move that day.

It moved after the annual meeting on 20 May 1998, inside the Santa Clara Convention Center at 5001 Great America Parkway.

The doors opened at 9:30 a.m.

The meeting began at 10:00.

Andrew S. Grove, chief executive since 1987, stayed on as full-time chairman.

Barrett, fifty-eight, had been president since May 1997 and chief operating officer since 1993.

He was the first Intel chief executive who had not been in the room on incorporation day in 1968.

The first three were Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Grove.

Grove's own public remarks that spring framed the hand-off as the company's habit of decade-long tenures, not as a health story.

Barrett inherited the tail of the PC boom, the first serious low-cost challenge from Advanced Micro Devices, and then the dot-com collapse.

He handed the chief-executive title to Paul Otellini in May 2005 and kept the chairmanship until the 2009 annual meeting.

The convention center, opened in 1986, is still the city's large hall.

It is a public building.

It is where the fourth name was added to the list.

Photo: Intel Free Press, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Moore, Barrett, Grove, Otellini). Convention center: CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.