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Semiconductor, with the understanding that Fairchild Camera and Instrument would have the right to buy Fairchild Semiconductor for $3 million at any time within the next eight years.
    Shockley took the defections very hard. He seemed as much hurt as
angered, and he was certainly angry enough. A friend of Shockley’s said to Noyce’s wife, Betty, “You must have known about this for quite some time. How on earth could you not tell me?” That was a baffling remark, unless one regarded Shockley as the father of the transistor and the defectors as the children he had taken beneath his mantle of greatness.
    If so, one had a point. Years later, if anyone had drawn up a family tree for the semiconductor industry, practically every important branch would have led straight from Shockley’s shed on South San Antonio Road. On the other hand, Noyce had been introduced to the transistor not by Shockley but by John Bardeen, via Grant Gale, and not in California but back in his own hometown, Grinnell, Iowa.
    For that matter, Josiah Grinnell had been a defector in his day, too, and there was no record that he had ever lost a night’s sleep over it.
    Noyce, Gordon Moore, Jean Hoerni, and the other five defectors set up Fairchild Semiconductor in a two-story warehouse building some speculator had built out of tilt-up concrete slabs on Charleston Avenue in Mountain View, about twelve blocks from Shockley’s operation. Mountain View was in the northern end of the Santa Clara Valley. In the business world the valley was known mainly for its apricot, pear, and plum orchards. From the work bays of the light-industry sheds that the speculators were beginning to build in the valley you could look out and see the raggedy little apricot trees they had never bothered to bulldoze after they bought the land from the farmers. A few well-known electronics firms were already in the valley: General Electric and IBM, as well as a company that had started up locally, Hewlett-Packard. Stanford University was encouraging engineering concerns to locate near Palo Alto and use the university’s research facilities. The man who ran the program was a friend of Shockley’s, Frederick E. Terman, whose father had originated the first scientific measurement of human intelligence, the Stanford-Binet IQ test.
    IBM had a facility in the valley that was devoted specifically to research rather than production. Both IBM and Hewlett-Packard were
trying to develop a highly esoteric and colossally expensive new device, the electronic computer. Shockley had been the first entrepreneur to come to the area to make semiconductors. After the defections his operation never got off the ground. Here in the Santa Clara Valley, that left the field to Noyce and the others at Fairchild.
    Fairchild’s start-up couldn’t have come at a better time. By 1957 there was sufficient demand from manufacturers who merely wanted transistors instead of vacuum tubes, for use in radios and other machines, to justify the new operation. But it was also in 1957 that the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I. In the electronics industry the ensuing space race had the effect of coupling two new inventions—the transistor and the computer—and magnifying the importance of both.
    The first American electronic computer, known as ENIAC, had been developed by the Army during the Second World War, chiefly as a means of computing artillery and bomb trajectories. The machine was a monster. It was one hundred feet long and ten feet high and required eighteen thousand vacuum tubes. The tubes generated so much heat, the temperature in the room sometimes reached 120 degrees. What the government needed was small computers that could be installed in rockets to provide automatic onboard guidance. Substituting transistors for vacuum tubes was an obvious way to cut down on the size. After Sputnik I the glamorous words in the semiconductor business were “computers” and “miniaturization.”
    Other than Shockley