Biography | Craig Barrett — The Year He Left the Stanford Faculty for Intel's Bowers Campus

Intel did not hire a chief executive in 1974.

It hired a technology-development manager who was bored with basic research.

Barrett had already consulted for Fairchild while teaching at Stanford.

He took a one-year leave at Intel in 1973, went back to the faculty, then resigned and joined for good in 1974.

The company had outgrown the first Mountain View rooms at 365 East Middlefield Road.

The new gravity was the Bowers campus in Santa Clara, on the site of an old pear orchard, at what became 3065 Bowers Avenue.

Fab 2, in building SC1 at Bowers and Central Expressway, had been running since 1968.

The 4004 had been made in a small fab at the center of that first Santa Clara building.

Barrett's first decade was process and yield, not the press circuit.

Japanese memory makers were taking the DRAM market Intel had invented.

In the mid-1980s he was put on the factories.

The method later called Copy Exactly — lock a process in a development fab, then reproduce every variable in every volume plant — is the piece of Intel lore most often attached to his name.

He became a vice president in 1984, senior vice president in 1987, executive vice president in 1990, a director in 1992, and chief operating officer in 1993.

The Bowers parcel is still Intel ground.

New mask-operations buildings are going up on it in the 2020s.

The 1974 rooms are not a museum.

The pin is the campus he walked into when he stopped being a professor.

Photo: Robert Scoble, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.