History of Intel

1. Schockley Co-Invents the Transistor in the East Cost: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley. Moves to Silicon Valley partly because his mother lives and he grew up there.

2. He hires a bunch of smart, but unknown young scientists to invent new forms of electronic equipment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shockley_Semiconductor_Laboratory

3. They get tired of his paranoia and refusal to listen to their ideas. They all quit to form their own company: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairchild_Semiconductor, and invented SRAM. Most of their technology is used for military

4. Intel spun off from Fairchild. Partly cos Fairchild started to fail. Partly because Intel wanted to make a new kind of chip. Its a Moore (manager-role) / Noyce (innovator-role) relationship and re-invented the DRAM chip thanks to Honeywell: http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa100898.htm.

5. Japanese companies started to do memory better than Americans. Quite a few American memory makers were wiped out. Luckily Intel invented the first micro-processor for a Japanese calculator company. Who also luckily gave ownership rights back to Intel. Well it wasn't just luck. They also hired the Japanese engineer who designed it with them. http://www.smartcomputing.com/Editorial/article.asp?article=articles/archive/r0605/66r05/66r05.asp&guid=#Shima,%20Masatoshi%20(1943-%20)