The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolutio - Isaacson Walter. Страница 53

Grove nurtured Noyce’s egalitarian approach—he worked in an exposed cubicle his entire career, and loved it—but he added an overlay of what he called “constructive confrontation.” He never put on airs, but he never let down his guard. In contrast to Noyce’s sweet gentility, Grove had a blunt, no-bullshit style. It was the same approach Steve Jobs would later use: brutal honesty, clear focus, and a demanding drive for excellence. “Andy was the guy who made sure the trains all ran on time,” recalled Ann Bowers. “He was a taskmaster. He had very strong views about what you should do and what you shouldn’t do and he was very direct about that.”⁵⁰

Despite their different styles, there was one thing that Noyce and Moore and Grove shared: an unwavering goal of making sure that innovation, experimentation, and entrepreneurship flourished at Intel. Grove’s mantra was “Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” Noyce and Moore may not have been paranoid, but they were never complacent.

THE MICROPROCESSOR

Inventions sometimes occur when people are confronted with a problem and scramble to solve it. At other times, they happen when people embrace a visionary goal. The tale of how Ted Hoff and his team at Intel invented the microprocessor is a case of both.

Hoff, who had been a young teacher at Stanford, became the twelfth employee at Intel, where he was assigned to work on chip design. He realized that it was wasteful and inelegant to design many types of microchips that each had a different function, which Intel was doing. A company would come in and ask it to build a microchip designed to do a specific task. Hoff envisioned, as did Noyce and others, an alternative approach: creating a general-purpose chip that could be instructed, or programmed, to do a variety of different applications as desired. In other words, a general-purpose computer on a chip.⁵¹

This vision coincided with a problem that was dumped in Hoff’s lap in the summer of 1969. A Japanese company named Busicom was planning a powerful new desktop calculator, and it had drawn up specifications for twelve special-purpose microchips (different ones to handle display, calculations, memory, etc.) that it wanted Intel to build. Intel agreed, and a price was set. Noyce asked Hoff to oversee the project. Soon a challenge arose. “The more I learned about this design, the more concerned I became that Intel may have undertaken more than it was prepared to deliver,” Hoff recalled. “The number of chips and their complexity was much greater than I had expected.” There was no way Intel could build them at the agreed price. Making matters worse, the growing popularity of Jack Kilby’s pocket calculator was forcing Busicom to cut its price even further.

“Well, if there’s anything you can think of to simplify the design, why don’t you pursue it,” Noyce suggested.⁵²

Hoff proposed that Intel design a single logic chip that could perform almost all of the tasks that Busicom wanted. “I know this can be done,” he said of the general-purpose chip. “It can be made to emulate a computer.” Noyce told him to try it.

Before they could sell the idea to Busicom, Noyce realized he had to convince someone who might be even more resistant: Andy Grove, who nominally worked for him. Part of what Grove saw as his mandate was keeping Intel focused. Noyce would say yes to almost anything; Grove’s job was to say no. When Noyce sauntered over to Grove’s workspace and sat on the corner of his desk, Grove was immediately on guard. He knew that Noyce’s effort to appear nonchalant was a sign that something was afoot. “We’re starting another project,” Noyce said, affecting a laugh.⁵³ Grove’s first reaction was to tell Noyce he was crazy. Intel was a fledgling company still struggling to manufacture its memory chips, and it didn’t need any distractions. But after he heard Noyce describe Hoff’s idea, Grove realized that resistance was probably wrong and definitely futile.

By September 1969 Hoff and his colleague Stan Mazor had sketched out the architecture of a general-purpose logic chip that could follow programming instructions. It would be able to do the work of nine of the twelve chips that Busicom had requested. Noyce and Hoff presented the option to Busicom executives, who agreed that it was the better approach.

When it came time to renegotiate the price, Hoff made a critical recommendation to Noyce, one that helped create a huge market for general-purpose chips and assured that Intel would remain a driver of the digital age. It was a deal point that Bill Gates and Microsoft would emulate with IBM a decade later. In return for giving Busicom a good price, Noyce insisted that Intel retain the rights to the new chip and be allowed to license it to other companies for purposes other than making a calculator. He realized that a chip that could be programmed to perform any logical function would become a standard component in electronic devices, the way two-by-four pieces of lumber were a standard component in the construction of houses. It would replace custom chips, which meant it could be manufactured in bulk and thus continually decline in price. It would also usher in a more subtle shift in the electronics industry: the importance of hardware engineers, who designed the placement of the components on a circuit board, began to be supplanted by a new breed, software engineers, whose job it was to program a set of instructions into the system.

Because it was essentially a computer processor on a chip, the new device was dubbed a microprocessor. In November 1971 Intel unveiled the product, the Intel 4004, to the public. It took out ads in trade magazines announcing “a new era of integrated electronics—a micro-programmable computer on a chip!” It was priced at $200, and orders, as well as thousands of requests for the manual, began pouring in. Noyce was attending a computer show in Las Vegas on the day of the announcement and was thrilled to watch potential customers cramming into the Intel suite.

Noyce became an apostle of the microprocessor. At a reunion in San Francisco he hosted for his extended family in 1972, he stood up in the bus he had chartered and waved a wafer over his head. “This is going to change the world,” he told them. “It’s going to revolutionize your home. In your own house, you’ll all have computers. You will have access to all sorts of information.” His relatives passed the wafer around the bus like an object of veneration. “You won’t need money anymore,” he prophesied. “Everything will happen electronically.”⁵⁴

He was exaggerating only slightly. Microprocessors began showing up in smart traffic lights and car brakes, coffeemakers and refrigerators, elevators and medical devices, and thousands of other gizmos. But the foremost success of the microprocessor was making possible smaller computers, most notably personal computers that you could have on your desk and in your home. And if Moore’s Law continued to hold true (as it would), a personal computer industry would grow up symbiotically with a microprocessor industry.

That is what happened in the 1970s. The microprocessor spawned hundreds of new companies making hardware and software for personal computers. Intel not only developed the leading-edge chips; it also created the culture that inspired venture-funded startups to transform the economy and uproot the apricot orchards of Santa Clara Valley, the forty-mile stretch of flat land from south San Francisco through Palo Alto to San Jose.

The valley’s main artery, a bustling highway named El Camino Real, was once the royal road that connected California’s twenty-one mission churches. By the early 1970s—thanks to Hewlett-Packard, Fred Terman’s Stanford Industrial Park, William Shockley, Fairchild and its Fairchildren—it connected a bustling corridor of tech companies. In 1971 the region got a new moniker. Don Hoefler, a columnist for the weekly trade paper Electronic News, began writing a series of columns entitled “Silicon Valley USA,” and the name stuck.⁵⁵