Biography|Robert Noyce — The Union Carbide Rooms on Middlefield That Became Intel

People treat Intel as a Santa Clara campus that always owned its own land.

The first desks were rented, in a Union Carbide office at 365 East Middlefield Road in Mountain View.

Noyce and Gordon Moore incorporated the new firm on 18 July 1968 after Fairchild's New York parent passed Noyce over for the top job.

They first filed as N.M. Electronics, then bought the name Intel, a clip of integrated electronics, from a hotel chain for $15,000.

Operations began on 1 August 1968 with about a dozen engineers in a conference room while Union Carbide finished moving out.

Andrew Grove, still at Fairchild, joined as the first hire.

The work was semiconductor memory, not microprocessors.

Moore told a local paper the building looked larger than they would need.

By 1969 the company photographed 106 employees on this lot, Noyce in front on the left and Moore on the right.

Intel opened a Santa Clara building in 1971 and left Middlefield in 1981.

The original box is still there, later marked on maps under later tenants.

A visitor sees a mid-century industrial block, not a visitor center.

The date on the door is August 1968.

Photo: Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore at Intel, 1970, two years after this address opened. Intel Free Press, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.