Semiconductor History | 844 East Charleston Road — Eight Resignations and a Contract Written on Dollar Bills

Eight men resigned from Shockley Semiconductor on 18 September 1957 and set up a company two kilometres down the road.

Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Sheldon Roberts were mostly under thirty, and none of them had run a business.

Their symbolic contract with each other and with their two bankers was a set of one-dollar bills, signed by everyone present. The Computer History Museum holds one of them, and dates the signing to 19 September 1957, though published accounts of when the meeting happened do not agree.

The money came from Sherman Fairchild's Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation on the East Coast, arranged by a young Hayden Stone analyst named Arthur Rock after roughly three dozen companies had declined.

Fairchild Camera lent the new subsidiary about $1.38 million and kept an option to buy it outright, which it exercised in 1959.

The structure matters more than the number. Nobody had financed a company this way on the West Coast before, and Rock went on to fund Intel and Apple, which makes this address the origin of a financial habit as much as a technical one.

Founding dates for Fairchild Semiconductor come in four flavours and the accounts blur them.

The resignations are 18 September, the dollar bills are dated 19 September, incorporation followed later that month, and the lease on this building was signed in October 1957.

Before that lease the eight worked out of each other's houses, building probers and benches in Victor Grinich's garage on Georgia Avenue in Palo Alto.

The building they moved into is a two-storey R&D shed of about 12,000 square feet, which is the whole of the physical romance available here.

Within two years, work done inside it produced the planar process and the monolithic integrated circuit, and within a decade its alumni had founded or funded most of the valley.

The company's own thread ran longer than its glory: sold to Schlumberger in 1979, to National Semiconductor in 1987, revived as a name in Maine in 1997, and absorbed by ON Semiconductor in 2016.

The building still stands and is still leased as commercial space, so there is nothing to enter.

Two plaques sit on granite blocks by the front door at 844A, and reading them from the pavement is the whole visit.

Photo: Dforouhari, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (the entrance at 844A East Charleston Road with both commemorative plaques).