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6

The Rebels

WHILE INTEL WAS DEVELOPING its first memory chips, great things were happening in the world outside. The company’s founders relaxed an early rule forbidding radios in the lab so Intel engineers could listen while they worked to Neil Armstrong’s live broadcast from the surface of the moon in July 1969. But neither Noyce, Moore nor Grove had much time for the Beatles, hippies and marijuana, or any of the other enthusiasms that had gripped so many young Americans. For student activism or demonstrations against the war in Vietnam they had still less time. Interviewed by Fortune in 1973, Moore said: ‘We are really the revolutionaries in the world today – not the kids with the long hair and beards who were wrecking the schools a few years ago’.

But political radicalism was not dead inside Intel. Its leading exponent was a gifted young circuit designer by the name of Joel Karp. With bell-bottoms and long hair, Karp was willing to risk the consternation of his employers by carrying anti-Vietnam petitions around Intel parties – and he was not even slightly put off when Grove and Les Vadasz, with the excess patriotism of the naturalized citizen, refused with stony faces to sign.

Karp displayed a wonderful ability to wind up his more conventional colleagues. On one occasion a new sales executive hired by Bob Graham bumped into him as he was about to leave the office for a technical meeting with a client. The shocked sales chief took one look at Karp’s shoulder-length hair, and ordered him to get it cut before attending the meeting. The following day Karp reappeared in the office with his hair blow-dried and styled with great skill, but only one-eighth of an inch shorter than the day before. There was silence from his colleagues as Karp walked down the lab, informed the sales chief with a smile that he was going to claim the haircut as a business expense, and presented him with a receipt for the then astounding sum of $25.

‘What about taking a bath?’ the VP replied acidly. ‘Will you charge that to the company too?’

Since he had been handing out leaflets arguing against the Vietnam war, Karp was the most natural suspect when a group of peace protesters assembled a picket in front of Intel’s offices to demonstrate against what they mistakenly believed to be a company that was engaged in military contracting. For once, even Bob Noyce displayed a flash of anger. ‘Get those fucking Berkeley friends of yours outta here,’ he told Karp through gritted teeth.

But beneath his long hair Karp had a rare aptitude for circuit design. A graduate of MIT, he had taught the subject to scientists at NASA, and had spent some time designing Polaris nuclear missile systems. Intel found him at a competing electronics company, and brought him in to do crucial parts of the work on the design for Intel’s first MOS memory chip. He was also the principal designer of a new MOS chip commissioned by Honeywell to follow the bipolar 3101 project that H. T. Chua had worked on, and played a big part in bringing into the daylight a later product that would make Intel’s fortune.

Another highly visible young member of the Intel crew was Bruce MacKay, who had the double distinction of being both the company’s youngest professional staffer and its only professional without a university degree. Born in Britain, he had learned the ropes of electronics at Texas Instruments’ local facility there, before moving to Bell Telephone in Canada.

‘It’s lucky that you’re over twenty-five,’ Andy Grove told MacKay one day, ‘because we don’t hire anyone under twenty-five.’ The young engineer, who was part of the team responsible for taking memory chips off the wafer lines and sending them through assembly and test, refrained tactfully from giving Grove his date of birth there and then.

MacKay drew attention to himself by becoming the first engineer to try to resign from Intel. A call came from AMD, and MacKay was invited over to meet Jerry Sanders in Sunnyvale, where he was subjected to the full power of the Sanders sales pitch. He was told that he would be working with a group of real people instead of a bunch of weirdos; he would have the same responsibilities but more money; and he would be given an outright grant of company stock instead of options. Intel’s stock-option scheme was arranged so that only a quarter of the options that employees were granted could be exercised in the first year. To exercise the rest, you had to stay three further years – but by then, you would have been given three more sets of options, each on the same terms. This meant that every Intel employee wishing to leave had to walk away from a significant block of shares in the company.

MacKay, whose badge showed that he was Intel employee number 50, liked what Sanders told him. Biting the bullet, he told his immediate boss that he was leaving. The next day Andy Grove appeared at his desk, insisted on taking him to a local bar in his rusty old Sunbeam Alpine, and sat him down at a table with a bottle of Scotch placed between them.

‘How can you do this?’ Grove demanded.

MacKay had his response ready. ‘I want to work somewhere where manufacturing is taken seriously,’ he said. ‘You guys just don’t think it’s terribly important. Tell me, Andy: if you had the choice of two seminars, one on solid state physics and one on inventory management, which would you choose? I know the answer already.’

But Grove was not to be put off. He kept MacKay talking and drinking until three in the morning – and when MacKay staggered up from the table, he had agreed to go back to AMD and tell Jerry Sanders that he was staying at Intel.

From that day onwards MacKay’s job suddenly began to get more interesting. He was given responsibility for the chip assembly operation that was carried out for Intel under contract across the Mexican border in the town of Tijuana. Several times a week MacKay would drive down Highway 101 past San Diego, cross the border into Mexico, and check on progress.

Strictly speaking, because he was a British citizen, MacKay did not have the privilege of free border crossing that an American would have done. After badgering the Mexican consul in San Diego, he obtained a six-month visa that effectively allowed him unlimited crossings. A bigger issue was how to get the finished silicon wafers with memory circuits laid out on them across to Mexico in good time for packaging. In theory, MacKay was supposed to clear them through customs, something that could only be done through a broker every Tuesday. In practice, he carried them in a leather carpet bag on the floor of his car, immediately behind the driver’s seat. Because a two-inch wafer could carry as many as 200 circuits, depending on the chip’s die size, he could carry thousands of chips at a time. After a while MacKay began to mark the bag every time he carried a shipment, in the same way that wartime fighter pilots used to mark the fuselage of their aircraft after shooting down an enemy plane. It was not always a clear run. On one occasion MacKay was turned back at the border because his hair was too long. Undaunted, he turned the car back to the US, changed places with his colleague in the passenger seat a mile up the road, tucked his pony-tail under his baseball cap, opened his newspaper to the sport page, and lay back sleepily as he was driven into Mexico through a different customs lane.

With Intel’s head office almost a day’s drive to the north, communications were of paramount importance. Telephone service through the local Mexican phone company was out of the question, not merely because the line quality was so poor but also because of the delay. So MacKay struck a private deal with a telephone engineer working at the local phone company in San Diego, and arranged for a five-mile cable to be run across the border so the assembly plant could be connected directly into the American phone system.

Another creative engineer at Intel was John Reed, who bumped into Andy Grove at a party while still working in his first job out of graduate school. Grove asked him what he thought of Intel’s product line. Pouring himself a drink, the young Reed replied breezily that the idea of using silicon gate technology in a memory chip was ‘kinda neat’, but added that he thought the rest of the company’s circuits ‘lacked creativity’. It was an off-the-cuff, ill-considered response – but a week later Reed received a call from Les Vadasz, inviting him to come and talk to people at Intel about whether he might like to put a little more creativity into their product line. Ever the joker, Reed turned down the first proposed date on the grounds that his wife was going to give birth that day. (Her doctor had warned her that the baby would need to be delivered by Caesarean section.) But Reed agreed to an interview the next day, 5 May 1971 – and the result was that he appeared at Intel’s Mountain View facility a month later for his first day at work.

Reed soon discovered that Intel had been a great deal more creative than he realized. Ted Hoff, the young Stanford researcher who had asked Bob Noyce point-blank whether the world needed another semiconductor company, had drawn up a concept for an entirely new memory cell, which needed only three transistors compared with the conventional four, and fewer interconnections. The concept had only one drawback: it would not produce stable storage when the computer was switched off. To maintain the information in the cell, the circuit had to be ‘refreshed’ every thousandth of a second. This added a substantial overhead to the memory system as a whole – but it offered the promise of packing cells together three to four times as densely as any existing product. If Intel could build it, this ‘dynamic random-access memory’ or DRAM would store 1,024 bits, four times as much information as the highest-capacity semiconductor memory device currently available in the world.

Karp and Vadasz had been assigned to turn Hoff’s one-cell circuit diagram into a working part. They had already produced one chip design – a part called the 1102, which was sold as a custom project to Honeywell, the customer for Intel’s original bipolar chip. It was their second version, the 1103 chip, that Reed was soon told to work on. Partly because of the complexity of the chip’s design, the first prototype wafers that came off the line did not contain a single working circuit. Reed spent a number of months on the project, fine-tuning the design and the manufacturing process before finally coming up with something that he believed would be manufacturable.

When Reed arrived in the fab area late one night to see the first prototypes of his new design roll off the line, Gordon Moore was waiting for him.

‘Reed, you screwed up,’ he joked. ‘Only seventy-five working dice per wafer.’

Achieving a yield of nearly 50% was thrilling news. Noyce and Moore were totally confident that, with further improvements to the design and the process, the manufacturing cost of the 1103 chip could soon fall to a point where Intel could sell it for $10.24 – a penny a bit. Computer makers would complain that this new dynamic semiconductor memory was more complex to work with than old-fashioned core memories. But it was smaller, much faster, and used much less power. And if its price per bit was lower than that of core memory, DRAM would conquer the world.

A delegation was hastily sent over to Massachusetts to persuade Honeywell to abandon the 1102 project and to put its backing behind the 1103. Three people went: John Reed, someone from sales, and Bob Noyce himself. When the presentations began, the Honeywell engineers were highly dubious. They had been cooperating with Intel for many months on the 1102, and the part was designed precisely in order to meet the requirements of Honeywell computers. Why should they throw away this work and switch to a product that Intel would soon be offering to all comers?

Essentially, Intel had two answers. The engineering answer was that the 1103 design, for all its additional complications, was proven to be easier to manufacture. This meant not only that it was more reliable now, but also that it offered better technical improvements in the future. The marketing answer was based on cost. Because of the manufacturability advantage, the 1103 was already considerably cheaper to build than the 1102 – and the gap would only widen. But the Honeywell engineers remained unconvinced.

It was only when Noyce, the father of the integrated circuit, began to speak that they sat up in their seats. Talking without notes or preparation, Noyce repeated some of the points that his colleagues had already made. What he said was in itself not new. But Noyce’s presence, his aura of authority, his seductively deep voice, won the day. Honeywell signed up to the 1103, and the three men returned triumphant to Mountain View in the knowledge that Intel could now focus all its efforts on developing a single memory product.

The launch of the new chip, in October 1970, proved to be a turning point in the history of the computer industry. As we’ll see, it was by no means a perfect product. But by undercutting the price of core memories, the 1103 established semiconductor memory as the technology of choice for computer makers from 1970 onwards – and set the industry on a familiar path of falling costs, rising performance and diminishing size. As the price of semiconductor memory fell over the coming decades, it would become cost-effective to build memory into lots of other devices too. Demand for memory products would become a multi-billion-dollar market – a market that Intel could legitimately claim to have created single-handed.

Noyce’s success at Honeywell was typical of his talents, and proof that he was admirably qualified to be Intel’s first CEO. He combined formidable technical expertise with a will to win and a sense of fun. In the passenger seat of his Mercury Cougar on the way to San Francisco airport, Reed discovered that his boss was a terrifying driver – weaving back and forth at high speed between lanes on Highway 101 in a playful attempt to show that he could get to the airport before any other car on the road. When Noyce came back from a weekend’s skiing with a broken leg freshly set in plaster, he would challenge the first comer to a wheelchair race down the corridor, laughing uproariously as he spun the wheels of his chair faster and faster, clattering against the wall as the wheelchair veered out of control.

The other role models inside the company were Andy Grove and Les Vadasz. Both of them were as determined to win as Noyce was. But they took life, and work, far more seriously. Grove told his old Fairchild colleagues that he believed their old company had been run far too much like a holiday camp. Vadasz, meanwhile, wanted tidy desks, proper filing systems, accurate lab notes, regular performance reviews.

The attempt to impose these qualities on the company’s engineering staff soon began to lead to friction. In March 1971, three months after the 1103 was introduced in commercial quantities, Vadasz wrote a performance review for John Reed which said as much about his own personality as about the engineer whose performance he was supposed to be rating.

‘One of the clichés one uses in reviewing’, Vadasz began, ‘is to say that so and so is a “capable engineer”. There is not much point, however, in a review to say only that. In fact, the more capable an engineer, the more need there is to explore not only accomplishments but to try to analyse problems, failures and all that is negative about the engineer’s job performance.’

He then offered a paragraph of measured praise, and then six further paragraphs demolishing Reed’s working practices point by point. He complained that the ‘problems the [1103] suffers from could fill a book’. Reed had ‘disengage[d] himself’ from day-to-day problems. He showed a ‘complete lack of initiative in taking (or identifying the need for) action’. It was ‘inexcusable’ that he failed to keep himself familiar with vital technical data. Reed was ‘disorganized’, and left ‘devices and data scattered about’. He always wanted ‘to move on too fast to new projects’.

‘I want to emphasize’, Vadasz concluded, ‘that I respect John’s engineering capability very much. John can solve any circuit problem we will have … My objections above all were all related to John’s working habits. Habits can be changed. I hope that John will be able to use this criticism in a constructive manner.’

Vadasz was wrong. The review made Reed incandescent with rage. He instantly wrote a furious memo for his own personnel file, headed, ‘To Whom It May Concern’, complaining about it. Reed opened his reply by pleading guilty to the charge of needing corrective feedback from above to keep him working on matters that were important. Then he went on the attack.

‘Here is a typewritten, signed off, filed-in-my-records report,’ he wrote, ‘citing specific examples of bad things I have done in my eight and one-half month tenure here, each one of which should have been directly criticized on the day it occurred! … The practice of saving up all these “constructive” criticisms in one package, to be delivered below the belt (in the form of a copy of an already filed report!), after the fact, is an indefensible management policy.’

So angered and disillusioned was Reed by the incident that he immediately cut back the eighty hours a week he had been spending at the plant, and started devoting more time to seeing his family and singing in a local choral group. Within another year he had left Intel for ever. When Andy Grove, hearing of his departure plans, asked him what could be done to make him stay, Reed looked at him uncomprehendingly. ‘This company is like a woman,’ he told Grove bitterly. ‘You’re madly in love with her, but then you find she’s been cheating on you. After that, you just can’t give your hundred per cent any more.’

‘We’d be happy with ninety-five,’ replied Grove.

But it was no good. Reed was determined to leave the company, and the only way to make the best of a bad job was to circulate the Vadasz review and the Reed response around the company as a lesson in how the business of reviewing performance should be approached. Intel would later institute a series of regular lunches at which engineers and technical staff would have a chance to make their grievances known to the company’s top management. They became known as the ‘John Reed Memorial Lunches’.

It was understandable that tempers inside Intel should run high. The conventional rule of thumb in the industry was ‘one man, one chip, one year’. Individuals took personal possession of design projects in a way that would be impossible today, where teams of 100 or more people can work on a single chip. A circuit designer would spend months drawing up his design. He – there weren’t any women engineers at Intel in 1971, or at most other electronics companies either – would work long hours working with a ‘layout girl’, a designer whose job was to cut the image of the circuits into a giant sheet of a red plastic-like substance called ‘rubylith’. He would check the design again and again over a period of weeks, following lines of different colours around the circuit with a finger to make sure that everything connected up properly. Finally, after months of perfecting the process, the first prototypes would be fabricated, with the designer waiting tensely outside the wafer sort area, where the devices would be tested and then sliced into individual chips, as if outside a delivery room. There were two possible outcomes: the horror of a stillbirth, or the elation of a working device. But it was an intensely personal experience. And nothing would make an engineer more angry than the hint that credit for an idea or a piece of work was going in the wrong direction.

One day in August 1970 Joel Karp opened the latest edition of Electronics magazine on his desk. To his astonishment, he found an article in the magazine about the 1102 chip written by Ted Hoff. True, Hoff had devised the dynamic memory cell that the chip was based on. But Karp felt the 1102 was his chip. Incensed, he rushed into Gordon Moore’s office and threw the magazine on Moore’s desk, open at the beginning of the offending article.

‘I promise you,’ said Moore with tears in his eyes, ‘I promise you that as long as I am in this company, nothing like this will ever happen again.’

But the jealousies inside the MOS group were nothing to the rivalry between the MOS group and the group of engineers working on bipolar circuits. As the 1103 began to make headway in the market, the company shifted resources away from bipolar technologies towards MOS. The bipolar engineers began to find it harder to book time on the testing equipment. Their prototypes would always take longer to emerge. Their projects would receive less attention from Noyce and Moore.

Commercially, this was probably the right decision. Even the most diehard enthusiasts for bipolar, such as H. T. Chua, whose faith in the technology had brought in the $10,000 from Honeywell, would admit later that MOS was the more promising process. At the time, however, the downgrading of the bipolar operation was taken by the team as a personal slight. How could they take it otherwise, when they had devoted so many late nights, so much effort, so much emotion, to making their bipolar projects work?

Vadasz, as head of the MOS engineering team, did not help matters. He had a knack of saying hurtful things to the bipolar people – not in meetings but just in corridors, in the company cafeteria, in the parking lot – that could spoil an entire day for them. Some of his greatest venom was reserved for Dick Bohn, the bipolar team leader. Bohn was under considerable stress to make bipolar perform. At the same time, he was left in no doubt that the company considered his beloved bipolar process no more than a transitional technology that would soon be phased out until it was used only for expensive niche products working at especially high speed. In the end the pressure became too much. Bohn began to drink heavily, and his work started to suffer. He was later eased out of the company, into a downward spiral of alcoholism and mental illness from which he did not recover for some time.

The fate of Dick Bohn was a terrible reminder to everyone at Intel of the high human cost of the conditions they worked under. Even Andy Grove, who was largely responsible for setting those conditions, felt a pang of conscience. A few years later, at a company retreat in the resort town of Pajaro Dunes, Grove would confide to a colleague that his contribution to the departure from Intel of Dick Bohn was the one thing in his life that he regretted most.