Only a very few of us, when we look back over our careers, could say that we were there at the birth of a new technology. Yet that is precisely the claim to fame of a group of engineers who, collectively, pretty much invented the semiconductor industry as we know it today.
The group formed Fairchild Semiconductor, celebrating its 50th Anniversary. Their collective brilliance was such that many of today’s leading semiconductor companies can trace their origins back to a small building in what was to become Silicon Valley.
But it is the short period before Fairchild which is of great importance because if it wasn’t for the less than perfect people skills of an electronics legend, things could have been so different.
