The History of Intel

The History of Intel

The microprocessor has changed our lives in so many ways that it is difficult to recall how different things were before its invention. During the 1960's, computers filled many rooms. Their expensive processing power was available only to a few government labs, research universities, and large corporations. Intel was founded on July 18,1968 by engineers, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Andrew Grove, and Arthur Rock. Rock became Chairman, Moore was President, Noyce was Executive Vice President in charge of product development and worked with Moore on long range planning, and Grove headed manufacturing. The purpose of the new company was to design and manufacture very complex silicon chips using large-scale integration (LSI) technology. Moore and Grove's vision was to make Intel the leader in developing even more powerful microprocessors and to make Intel-designed chips the industry standard in powering personal computers. Moore and Noyce wanted to seek Intel because they wanted to regain the satisfaction of research and development in a small growing company. Although the production of memory chips was starting to become a commodity business in the late 1960's, Moore and Noyce believed they could produce chip versions of their own design that would perform more functions at less cost for the customer and thus offer a premium price. Intel's unique challenge was to make semiconductor memory functional. Semiconductor memory is smaller in size, provides great performance, and reduces energy consumption. This first started when Japanese manufacturer Busicom asked Intel to design a set of chips for a family of high-performance programming calculators. Intel's engineer, Ted Hoff, rejected the proposal and i...

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...his is the reason why Intel is mainly focused on the computer sector. As Andy Grove put it, "The Internet is like a 20-foot tidal wave coming thousands of miles across the Pacific, and we are in kayaks. It's...gaining momentum, and its going to lift you and drop you. It affects everybody…the computer industry, telecommunications, the media, chipmakers, and the software world."

FUTURE PROSPECTS

Their commitment to R&D creates future generations of products and the manufacturing processes they use to make them, while their capital expenditures ensure the availability of state-of-the-art factories that allow them to deliver high-volume, high-performance microprocessors efficiently. Looking into the future, they will continue to manufacture quality microprocessors that will live up to the Intel name and strive towards perfecting their existing ones.