– 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
