James Gibbons

It was a startling letter. He [William Shockley] said he was looking forward to having me come to his lab. And he want to explain how he want to work with people. He said, the way I want to work with you is I'll decide on the project and I'll tell you how I think you should work on it and you can tell me how you think you should work on it. And If I like my ideas better than yours, you'll work on it the way I want you to.

Shockley sent us through psychological interview. I had to go up to New York and spent the whole day taking tests of various kinds. I know Noyce did the same thing because eventually, Shockley let me read Noyce's result as well as my own. And for sure shared mine with Bob. And the conclusions of both of those was, these guys are good technically but they'll never be managers.

Well, these threats from Beckman we didn't take too seriously. But here, I was very ... I've never met a wealthy man before in my life, especially a wealthy scientist, so I was very impress with him. I remember one day he said ... I feel like a million dollar and I said, does that mean you feel good or you feel bad.

Shockley made two key decisions right at the beginning. To use Silicone and do things by diffusion. And that was subject for debate. To this day I never touch a piece of Germanium. Bob who had worked with Germanium said it's lucky that you hadn't because you don't know how easy Germanium is compare to Silicone. We didn't know the difficulty, or the problems that we have to solve that haven't been completely solve yet.

The equipment in those days were extremely primitive. Materials were unknown or you couldn't find any. You have to deal with purity that nobody was used to.

I don't think there's any special reasons to believe it would of happen here if it hadn't for Shockley. He brought the Silicone and the idea of diffusion here as Jay just said. And it just kinda grew. If that had happen some place else, it would of just as well develop in Texas, or in New Jersey, or wherever the appropriate place was.

Big company spent a lot of their effort trying to show why things won't work and I think little company spent their time and effort trying to make things work. They have great flexibility, there's no built-in history of shooting somebody's idea there. It just a clean slate that you can work with.

I think it's a kind of a general deal with big companies do variation on a theme very effectively. They don't do really do new things well at all. They get the ideas, they generate them but they don't put the focus and the team on them that a startup can do. That's been the Silicon Valley big success here now. Little startup teams do things that big company really couldn't touch and ... really successfully

I have been running the lab at Fairchild, and I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the difficulty of getting something new, into the production facility. Essentially all the technical competent resided in the R&D group, we can tell the production people what to do and they did it. As they became more and more technically competent, they were less and less willing to accept what we discover in the laboratory. And it was a problem that a lot of central research laboratory have, they become kind of irrelevant so far as the company is concern. So we setup Intel, we decided that we would take inefficiency in manufacturing in order to do the technology transfer effectively, rather than setup a separate laboratory.