Gordon E. Moore, Intel Co-Founder Behind Moore’s Law, Dies at 94

So Mr. Moore took a position with the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Then, looking for a way back to California, he interviewed at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. He was offered a job, he wrote, “but I decided I didn’t want to take spectra of exploding nuclear bombs, so I turned it down.”

Instead, in 1956, Mr. Moore joined William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor, to work at a West Coast division of Bell Laboratories, a start-up unit whose aim was to make a cheap silicon transistor.

But the company, Shockley Semiconductor, foundered under Mr. Shockley, who had no experience running a company. In 1957, Mr. Moore and Mr. Noyce joined a group of defectors who came to be known as “the traitorous eight.” With each putting in $500, along with $1.3 million in backing from the aircraft pioneer Sherman Fairchild, the eight men left to form the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, which became a pioneer in manufacturing integrated circuits.

Bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, Mr. Moore and Mr. Noyce decided in 1968 to form their own company, focusing on semiconductor memory. They wrote what Mr. Moore described as a “very general” business plan.

“It said we were going to work with silicon,” he said in 1994, “and make interesting products.”

Their vague proposal notwithstanding, they had no trouble finding financial backing.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/24/technology/gordon-moore-dead.html