Gordon Moore

Orders of magnitude only matter in salary.

In a business like this, the people with the power are the ones that have the understanding of what's going on, not necessary the one on top. It is very important that those people that have the knowledge are the ones that make the decision. So we setup something where everyone who had the knowledge had an equal say on what was going on.

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.

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.

We lived on this side of the street. My grandfather had a store directly across. Behind that, we had our cow. That was part of living in a place like this; you can have your cow close by.