Semiconductor History | 365 East Middlefield Road — Intel Began in a Conference Room the Last Tenant Had Not Vacated

Robert Noyce wrote to Sherman Fairchild on 25 June 1968 to resign, and gave a reason that is unusually specific for a corporate letter.

Fairchild had grown large, he wrote, and he had enjoyed his daily work less and less as it did; he wanted to go back to the earlier days, with less administrative work and more of what he called a new product, a new technology, and a new organization.

Twenty-three days later, on 18 July 1968, he and Gordon Moore incorporated the company that got all three.

The paperwork said NM Electronics, for Noyce and Moore, because they had rejected Moore Noyce as sounding too much like more noise for an electronics firm.

Within weeks they wanted Intel, short for integrated electronics, and paid a hotel chain called Intelco $15,000 for the rights to the name rather than think of another one.

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

Union Carbide had not finished moving out, so about a dozen engineers worked from the conference room, which was the only space available.

The business plan Moore typed was three vague paragraphs long, and the plan behind it was not vague at all: semiconductor memory was ten times the price of magnetic core memory and falling fast, and they intended to be there when the lines crossed.

Memory came first, not a processor.

The 3101 shipped in 1969, a 64-bit bipolar static RAM, and the 1103 dynamic RAM followed in 1970 and did the actual killing of core memory. The 4004 microprocessor, which is what Intel is remembered for, arrived in 1971 as a contract job for a Japanese calculator company.

Their route is short enough to walk in an afternoon, and it stays inside two towns.

Shockley's shed on San Antonio Road, Fairchild's building on East Charleston, then this office on East Middlefield, three addresses within about eight kilometres of each other, covering twelve years and most of the industry's founding decisions.

This one is the least marked of the three. There is no plaque at 365 East Middlefield Road, and the address today is an ordinary Mountain View office building on a street of ordinary office buildings.

The letter is the artifact worth looking at instead, and Intel put it in its own public archive.

Photo: Intel Free Press, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Robert Noyce's June 1968 resignation letter to Sherman Fairchild, first page).

Photo: Intel Free Press, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce at Intel in 1970, two years after the founding and at a later Intel site).