Finance History | 365 East Middlefield Road — Two Fairchild Men and a Page-and-a-Half Circular

People treat Intel as a Santa Clara campus and a later foundry bet.

The first rooms were rented from Union Carbide on this street.

On 18 July 1968 Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore incorporated NM Electronics in Mountain View after leaving Fairchild Semiconductor.

They bought the name Intel, short for Integrated Electronics, from a hotel-chain trademark and used it before the month ended.

Arthur Rock put 10,000 dollars of his own money into the stock at 1 dollar a share in 1968 and raised 2.5 million dollars of convertible debentures from a small list of private buyers.

Noyce and Moore each took 245,000 of the original 500,000 shares at 1 dollar.

Andrew Grove joined as an early employee, not as a named founder on the papers.

Twelve engineers first sat in a conference room while Union Carbide finished moving out of about 30,000 square feet.

The first product, in 1969, was the 3101, a Schottky bipolar 64-bit SRAM.

A 1969 staff photograph shows 106 people on the lawn of this building.

Intel opened a Santa Clara site in 1971 and left East Middlefield Road in 1981.

The 1968 structure still stands on the lot, later occupied by other chip and software tenants.

The mechanism is founder equity priced with the same 1-dollar share the venture circular sold to outsiders, so the men who left Fairchild kept the upside they had lost when Fairchild Camera exercised its option.

Photo: Intel Free Press, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.