Dave House

I developed along of finally culminating and turning out small production quantities of Nitroglycerine which i made it into dynamite. A couple ounces of dynamite makes an absolutely fantastic firecracker.

Shockley had unique management techniques. And a group of us went around him to Arnold Beckman, the Beckman instruments, which was where the financing was coming from. And suggested that Shockley should be put in a position where he could be a consultant; somebody else that are being brought in to run the organization. Well, we are making progress but we learned a bunch of young kids have a tough time pushing a new Nobel prize-winner aside. And Beckman became convinced that this would ruin Shockley's career so essentially ended up telling us Shockley's the boss, take it or leave it. We'd burned our bridges so badly by then, we felt we had to leave it. That was the origin of what turned out to be Fairchild Semiconductor.

I had a couple of big envelopes of what we called cosmetic rejects; they didn't look good but they still works.

It still amazes me how far we've been able to go. We have a technology that hasn't really run across the problem that fundamentally stopped it. Something that changes as fast as this has is really amazing. Several times along the way, I think I've felt there were barriers and we weren't out there very far; the closer we got to them the further away the barriers went or they just dissolved away. We make devices now that are really small.

I just looked at the data we had for the first few years. You know starting with one transistor of the kind in 59 and 61 the first integrated circuit so forth and so we've been about doubling every year. The next one coming had about 60 components on it so I just took that doubling every year nad extrapolated from sixty to sixty thousand components for the next ten years and said that's what's going to happen, it's going to make cheaper electronics. I never had any idea it was going to be at all precise. You know we just trying to get the message across that by putting a lot more stuff on a chip, we were gonna make much cheaper electronics.

Two or three generations is about as far as I've ever been able to see and it keeps receding as you get closer. There always seems to be a barrier out there about three generations away

I am amazed at how many context that Moore's Law was used and I am happy to take credit for all of them.