Today in Technology History
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December 12
One of the inventors of the integrated circuit -- an essential part of the modern computer -- was born exactly 75 years ago.
Robert Norton Noyce was born in Iowa on December 12, 1927. While studying electronics at Grinnell College in his hometown, Noyce got to work with one of the first transistors -- a new electronic component that was about to replace the vacuum tube. Noyce got a Ph.D. from MIT in 1953, and after a couple of years at a company in Philadelphia, he moved out to California to work for William Shockley, one of the three men jointly credited with having invented the transistor.
Unfortunately, Shockley proved to be an unbearably domineering boss. After one especially unpleasant episode -- Shockley subjected an employee to a lie-detector test -- Noyce and seven others defected in 1957 and started their own company, Fairchild Semiconductor. Noyce was the new company's general manager and research director.
In 1959, Noyce invented the "integrated circuit" -- a way to put several transistors together, all on a single sheet of silicon, with the connections simply etched between them. For the first time, these vital computer components could be mass-produced, since the circuits etched into the silicon board now replaced the old custom wirings. With the wires gone, the modern age of miniaturization -- meaning smaller and faster computers -- could begin.
(A device similar to Noyce's integrated circuit was independently invented at roughly the same time by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments, so both Kilby and Noyce are given credit for the invention.)
In 1968, Noyce and a few of his colleagues from Fairchild left to start yet another new company, one you've certainly heard of: Intel. (The name is short for "integrated electronics.")
In addition to his technical innovations, Noyce helped to start some of the practices that have come to characterize the modern computer industry. In part because of his bitter experience working for Shockley, Noyce despised top-down, hierarchical management -- preferring instead an open, collaborative, informal organization that has been widely imitated. Also, the Noyce model of quitting to start a new company has come to characterize the high-tech industry, which is rife with defections and spin-off companies.
In the 1980s, Noyce became such an important spokesman for the U.S. high-tech industry that some people called him the "Mayor of Silicon Valley." He died in 1990, at the age of 62.
Related links:
We mentioned above that Noyce first encountered a transistor when he was in college in the 1940s, very soon after the transistor was invented. That transistor had been given to one of Noyce's professors by a friend -- John Bardeen, one of the three men who shared the Nobel Prize for inventing the transistor. We wrote about Bardeen last May.
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers awards a "Robert N. Noyce Medal for exceptional contributions to the microelectronics industry."
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