Biography | Robert Noyce — The Conference Room in the Union Carbide Building That Became Intel

By 1968 Fairchild Semiconductor had about 14,000 employees and $200 million in sales. Noyce was no longer running a start-up. He and Gordon Moore resigned. In the letter Noyce sent as he left, he said he did not expect to join another company that was simply a semiconductor manufacturer. He would rather try a small firm chasing a product or a process nobody had done yet. To stay small, he added, he might form a new company after a vacation. They incorporated on 18 July 1968 as NM Electronics. Arthur Rock put in $10,000 of his own and raised about $2.5 million more. Noyce and Moore each took 245,000 shares at a dollar. Rock took 10,000. Andrew Grove joined as employee number three. The name change came within weeks. Intel was a compression of integrated electronics. A hotel chain already used a close variant, Intelco. Moore later recalled that paying $15,000 for the rights was easier than inventing another name. Operations began on 1 August 1968. About a dozen engineers worked from a conference room in this former Union Carbide building at 365 East Middlefield Road while the previous tenant moved out. Moore wondered whether they would ever need the whole building. They outgrew it. A Santa Clara plant opened in 1971. Intel left Middlefield Road in 1981. The structure is still there, altered but recognizable. It housed design, management, and the first fabrication under one roof. The 3101 bipolar RAM shipped in 1969. The 1103 DRAM followed. The 4004 microprocessor arrived in 1971. Grinnell College's endowment put $100,000 into the seed round, a trustee vote Noyce could not have forced from a distance. Warren Buffett, then advising the college, later said he did not understand the industry and let the check go through anyway. This pin is a person-memory, not a product timeline. The company-history collection already covers what Intel built. The fact that belongs here is simpler: Noyce and Moore rented a conference room, bought a name, and started over. Photo: Intel Free Press, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce at Intel in 1970.