By Leslie Berlin
About this article
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Over the years, we at ZATZ have had the opportunity to publish articles by some well known authors and true experts in the field. Leslie Berlin is a visiting scholar in the history of technology at Stanford. Leslie tells us, "I knew I wanted to write about the history of Silicon Valley and began reading everything I could on the subject. Soon, I noticed that one name -- Bob Noyce -- kept coming up. I decided that the best way to get a handle on the origins of the high-tech revolution would be to read a biography of this Noyce fellow. But when I looked for the biography, there was none. So I set out to write one."
Almost ten years later, the biography is here. Leslie draws on more than 100 interviews and dozens of never-before-seen documents to bring Noyce's story to life. We're thrilled that Leslie has agreed to write an original article for Computing Unplugged explaining why Robert Noyce is such a key figure in technology.
And now, Leslie Berlin's article...
Chances are, you've never heard of Robert Noyce. Yet his legacy is embedded deep in the DNA of modern high technology.
Your cell phone, your iPod, your PDA, your computer -- not to mention your car, your appliances, the ATM at your bank, hearing aids, and pacemakers -- all of these are controlled by ultra-complex descendants of a device Noyce conceived almost half-a-century ago and called a "semiconductor device and lead structure." Today we call it a microchip. Jack Kilby, whose near simultaneous scheme for a similar device led to his being named Noyce's co-inventor of the chip, went on to win a Nobel Prize in 2000. Noyce didn't, but only because of his untimely death in 1990 at the age of 62. [Jack St. Clair Kilby passed away June 20, 2005.]
"Discovery, excitement, changing lives -- and yes, the chance to make a fortune -- this is the stuff of science and engineering."
The invention of the microchip was a signal event in Robert Noyce's life. It was not the only one. Less than two years before, Noyce had led a team of scientists in founding one of the first venture-capital-backed, research-intensive, wildly successful high-tech companies in Silicon Valley: Fairchild Semiconductor. And in 1968, he and Gordon Moore launched Intel, where Noyce was a critical force behind the company's development of the microprocessor.
