Death of Gordon Moore, entrepreneur “by accident” and co-founder of Intel

Intel, the leader in computer processors, lost its co-founder Gordon Moore, who died on Friday March 24 in Hawaii, at the age of 94. In an article written in the journal Engineering and ScienceMoore described himself in 1994 as “entrepreneur by accident”. In fact, his beginnings remind us that the trajectory of captains of industry is not always sewn with white thread. Moore was born in 1929, the year of the stock market crash, and grew up in a small California town called Pescadero. His mother runs the local store, his father is a deputy sheriff. A child passionate about science, he joined the University of Berkeley, located a hundred kilometers away.

The nearby Silicon Valley is beginning to emerge from the ground. But Moore is not yet interested in electronics. With his doctorate in chemistry under his arm, he left to work at the naval missile fuel on the east coast, at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Then, his team disbanded, he had an interview at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory: he was asked to analyze the explosions of atomic bombs.

His refusal will open the doors of Silicon Valley to him. Indeed, the candidates who refused the offer of the Livermore Laboratory receive a call from Bill Shockley, future Nobel Prize in physics, co-inventor, in the 1940s, of the transistor, who is looking for a chemist to work on a less expensive electronic chip. . It will combine several electronic circuits into one: it will be one of the first integrated circuits. Gordon Moore accepts.

electronics pioneers

Disappointed by Shockley’s management, Moore left him the following year, in 1956, with eight other renegades. Together they founded the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, which quickly carved out a share of the nascent electronics market. It was in this company that in 1963, when he held the position of director of research and development, Moore formulated for the first time the famous law that would bear his name. Noting the regular increase in the number of transistors in electronic chips, he predicts that their number will continue to double regularly.

Moore’s Law is not a scientific demonstration but rather a profession of faith in the power of engineering. It earned him a start of notoriety in Silicon Valley, modest of course, because Moore is not yet a tutelary figure. The microprocessor is not yet born, but it cannot be too late.

In 1968, Moore founded Intel (Integrated Electronics) with his colleague Robert Noyce. With a fairly vague business plan in mind, the two men raised a few million dollars in funds, and began to manufacture memory. First original choice for the time: Intel uses silicon as a base, a chemical element found in particular in sand. Informed second choice, Intel figures among the very first companies to study a microprocessor, combining most of the central electronic chips of a computer into a single one. A key invention in the history of microcomputing.

Revolutionary by accident

However, Gordon Moore does not foresee this revolution to come. At the time, many engineers imagine that the microprocessor will be used mainly in calculators. In his 1994 article, Moore even revealed that he hadn’t seen the point of the PC: “Long before Apple, one of our engineers suggested I build a home computer. I asked him, “But why would anyone want a computer for their home?” »

Other engineers will have this vision in its place, that of a PC made much cheaper, much smaller, and much less greedy in electricity by the use of a microprocessor. Some of these pioneering minds will also use an Intel processor in their microcomputers, like the inventors of pioneering machines like the Micral or the Altair. But other computers like the Apple II, one of the first big commercial successes of microcomputing, incorporates a competing processor.

Moore made up for it by taking over the helm of Intel in 1975. Within twelve years as CEO, he imposes his microprocessors as the world standard, ahead of those of companies like Texas Instrument or Motorola. After which, for another twenty years, he watches over his legacy as Chairman of the Board of Directors. When he retired in 1997, he had the satisfaction of noticing that Moore’s law, enunciated in the 1960s, had not derailed: the density of integrated circuits continued to double every eighteen months. It will be necessary to wait for 2008 so that it knows its first growing pains.

During his career, Gordon Moore amassed a considerable fortune, estimated at 7 billion dollars (approximately 6.49 billion euros) per Forbes. Character described as thrifty with his words, humble, and simply dressed, he would have paid during his lifetime half of his estate to a foundation bearing his name and that of his wife, Betty. This organization supports hospitals, universities, environmental NGOs, and scientific laboratories.