Biography | Robert Noyce — The Middlefield Road Rooms Intel Occupied While Union Carbide Moved Out

On 18 July 1968 Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore incorporated a company first called NM Electronics.

By the end of the month the name was Intel, a contraction of integrated electronics.

They paid a Midwestern hotel chain about 15,000 dollars for the right to use a name already held as Intelco.

Arthur Rock, who had helped finance Fairchild in 1957, raised the first capital.

Noyce and Moore each took 245,000 shares at a dollar. Rock took 10,000.

Operations began on 1 August in a leased former Union Carbide building at 365 East Middlefield Road, Mountain View.

The first dozen engineers worked from a conference room while Union Carbide finished moving out.

Moore told a local paper the building looked larger than they would need.

A 1969 staff photograph taken in front of this building shows 106 employees.

Noyce stands at front left, Moore at front right, and Andrew Grove just behind Moore.

Grove had been their first hire from Fairchild.

Intel opened its first owned plant in Santa Clara in 1971, on ground that had been a pear orchard, and left Middlefield Road in 1981.

The same structure later housed other firms.

The address is now part of the Middlefield-Ellis-Whisman Superfund study area, from solvents used in early semiconductor work on this block.

What started in the conference room was a memory company. The microprocessor was still two years and another building away.

Photo: Intel Free Press, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Intel Mountain View staff, 1969).