plentiful.
For a scientist, Moore seemed to show scant interest in the state of repair of his craft. Sometimes he had to scrape the rust off the spark-plugs with his pocket knife. Sometimes, the boat’s rudimentary radio would cut out, leaving the fishermen cut off from the outside world. But on one occasion a more serious problem arose. The part of the expedition that required the most skill was traversing what the local fishermen called the ‘Potato Patch’, a narrow channel bordered with rocks just beyond the bridge that led to the fishing grounds beyond. One morning, just as they were halfway through the Potato Patch, Graham noticed water slopping around in the bilges of the boat.
‘Oh,’ said Moore absent-mindedly. ‘I must have forgotten to switch the bilge-pump on.’ He disappeared for a few seconds, and Graham began to hear the sound of the electric pump groaning into action. Thirty seconds later, however, the water level was still rising.
‘The pump!’ yelled Graham. ‘It’s not working!’ Frantically, he and Moore grabbed whatever receptacles were closest to hand, and began to throw bucketfuls of water overboard. Yet as fast as they bailed water out, more seemed to come in. While Graham continued to empty the buckets as fast as he could – splash, splash, splash, splash, splash – Moore went to inspect the drain fittings.
Ten minutes later the problem was solved. The hole in the boat that Moore had discovered was plugged with an old oily rag, and the two friends lay back, exhausted by their efforts. As the sun rose over the city behind them, they celebrated their survival into a new day with an early-morning beer.
BOB GRAHAM’S APPOINTMENT as Intel’s sales director had an unintended consequence. It led indirectly to the creation of another electronics company which for the next two decades would be at times Intel’s greatest ally, and at times its most bitter enemy.
Here’s how it happened.
Soon after Bob Noyce had left Fairchild Semiconductor to set up Intel with Gordon Moore, the management of the Fairchild parent company on the East Coast began the search for Noyce’s replacement as general manager. C. Lester Hogan, the feared and admired head of Motorola, was the man who got the job – but it was a measure of the presentiments of doom felt by company insiders that he would only accept the appointment after being offered $1m in salary over three years, plus Fairchild stock options worth over $500,000, and a loan of a further $5m to buy more stock with. Hogan also secured guarantees that he would be able to run the semiconductor operation as an independent business, free from interference by the accountants back east that had so plagued Bob Noyce.
The new general manager’s first move once he was installed at Fairchild was to fire most of the top executives left in the company, and bring in his own band of hard men, later known as Hogan’s Heroes. Only one senior manager stayed on: Jerry Sanders, the company’s sales and marketing director.
Flamboyant, clever, fast-talking and handsome, Sanders satisfied every cliché of what a businessman in California headed for the high-tech 1970s ought to look like. But behind the Italian suits and the perfectly bouffant hairstyle, the marketing chief was not what he seemed. Sanders had been born the son of a dissolute traffic-signal repairman in Chicago’s dangerous South Side, and had been brought up by his grandparents after spending his earliest years with his mother in a succession of dingy low-rent apartments while his father went on periodic drinking binges. Like many poor boys before him, Sanders had hoped to parlay his good looks into a career in the movies. But his chances were set back during his first semester into a two-year course at the University of Illinois. A gang of local toughs set on him after a football game, fractured his jaw, skull, and ribs, carved up his face with a can-opener, and dumped him, bleeding, in a trash can. A friend carried him in the trunk of a car to the local hospital, where he was rushed into the emergency room and read the last rites.
With his rearranged profile, Sanders realized he would have to give up his ambition to be a matinée idol. Instead, he resolved to put his electrical engineering training to practical use, and joined the Douglas Aircraft Company as a designer of air-conditioning systems. It took him only a few years to discover that if he wanted a company car, a good salary and an expense account, he was in the wrong job. In the electronics industry salesmen made better money than engineers.
Sanders made the switch, and rose swiftly through the ranks. He made a spectacular success of running Fairchild Semiconductor’s regional office in Los Angeles, and then landed the company’s top marketing slot back in Silicon Valley. With a large house in the Hollywood hills, an attractive young wife, a black Cadillac, and a taste for Dom Pérignon champagne, he looked more like a movie mogul than an electronics guy. Yet Sanders knew the electronics industry inside out – and behind the glitz and ostentation was a determined and hard worker.
Sanders was always something of a favourite with Bob Noyce – perhaps because he reminded the older man of the showmanship and extroversion that was part of his own character. The young marketing star was much less kindly looked on by the more conservative Gordon Moore. Moore had a full dose of the disdain that many engineers have for salesmen. He viewed them as a necessary evil, but no better than that. Moore knew that the old saying, ‘Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door,’ wasn’t true. But he wished it were. Perhaps this was why Bob Graham got the new sales and marketing job at Intel, while Jerry Sanders was left at Fairchild Semiconductor.
Whether this was the reason or not, Sanders knew his position at Fairchild was precarious. He felt like a courtier left over from a discredited regime after the arrival of a new king. Within a matter of weeks the agony ended. Hogan called Sanders into his office and told him point-blank that he was surplus to requirements. The only consolation was that while many other Fairchild loyalists had been fired after years of loyal service with no more than a couple of weeks’ notice, Sanders was able to extract a year’s salary in compensation – allowing him to rent a beach-house in Malibu where he could sit in the sun and ponder his next move.
Six weeks later, early in 1969, Sanders called an old pal – Ed Turney, one of Fairchild’s best salesmen. Sanders had given Turney the job of running Fairchild’s Los Angeles region, and the two men had become friends. By this time Turney had been fired too, and was snowed up in a cabin in a nearby ski resort.
‘How’d you like to start a company?’ Sanders asked.
‘What, making records?’ Turney still believed that Sanders had secret showbiz ambitions.
‘No, making semiconductors.’
Sanders explained that he had received an approach from a group of four other Fairchild employees who were looking for someone of presidential calibre to help them to raise finance. Sanders had agreed to lead them, on two conditions. He thought the future was in digital circuits like Intel was making, not the old-fashioned analog circuits they had set their heart on. So he wanted the new company to make both classes of product. Also, he wanted to nominate some of his own people. If Turney was ready to join the startup, Sanders promised, a seat would be kept warm for him.
Within a few weeks Sanders had assembled an eight-man team. To the four members of the analog group, he added himself and another former Fairchild colleague, John Carey, plus Turney, who was offered the sales and marketing job but also wanted to control purchasing. The top engineering job for the digital operation went to Sven Simonsen, a Danish-born engineer who was still on the Fairchild payroll.
Three weeks later Jerry Sanders was ready to talk to potential investors about his plans. Capital Group
