This Day in American History: Intel Is Founded
- ForAmerica
- 7 hours ago
- 2 min read
On this day in 1968, two restless engineers quit a comfortable job to bet on an idea that would remake the entire world economy.
On July 18, 1968, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore incorporated a small new company in Mountain View, California, after walking away from Fairchild Semiconductor, the very company they had helped build into a Silicon Valley powerhouse. Both men were already legends in the chip business -- Noyce had co-invented the integrated circuit, and Moore had coined the industry's defining rule of thumb, Moore's Law. Frustrated that Fairchild's corporate parent wasn't reinvesting in the technology they believed would define the next decade, they decided to build it themselves.
Noyce typed up a one-page business plan so vague it barely qualified as a pitch, and it was enough to convince venture capitalist Arthur Rock to raise $2.5 million to get the company off the ground. They filed the paperwork as "NM Electronics" -- for Noyce and Moore -- before buying the rights to a snappier name: Intel, short for Integrated Electronics. Andy Grove, a brilliant young Hungarian refugee and fellow Fairchild alum, joined almost immediately and would go on to become one of the most consequential CEOs in American business history.
Intel's first products were memory chips, but everything changed in 1971 when the company released the 4004, the world's first commercially available microprocessor -- an entire computer's brain shrunk onto a single sliver of silicon. That chip, born out of a contract to build calculator components, quietly launched the personal computer revolution and made Silicon Valley synonymous with American innovation.
Also on this day:
1863 -- Colonel Robert Gould Shaw and 272 soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts, one of the Union's first African American regiments, are killed in a courageous assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina.
1947 -- President Truman signs the Presidential Succession Act, modernizing the line of succession behind the vice president.
1976 -- Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci scores the first perfect 10 in Olympic history at the Montreal Games.
1986 -- The first close-up videotapes of the sunken RMS Titanic are released to the public.
2013 -- Detroit becomes the largest U.S. city ever to file for municipal bankruptcy.
A lawnmower, a one-page business plan, and $2.5 million -- that's all it took to build the company that would go on to power the modern world. Only in America.
Source: Intel Corporate History, Computer History Museum