William Shockley: the traitorous eight Concepts

The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution

by T. R. Reid · 18 Dec 2007 · 293pp · 91,110 words

and frustrated, eight of the young scientists, including Noyce, Moore, and Hoerni, decided to look for another place to work. That first group—Shockley called them “the traitorous eight”—turned out to be pioneers, for they established a pattern that has been followed time and again in Silicon Valley ever since. They decided

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another report cards. When the grades were tabulated, Noyce emerged as the consensus choice to be the group’s technical director. Accordingly, when the “traitorous eight” left Shockley in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor, the group turned to Noyce as soon as it became clear that somebody was going to have to act

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Jacob Millman, Microelectronics, p. 100. described Noyce as an introvert: The Economist, Dec. 27, 1980, p. 63. “There was a group . . .”: Interview with Noyce. “the traitorous eight”: Dirk Hanson, The New Alchemists (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), p. 92; also, interview with Gordon Moore. “the realization . . .”: Interview with Noyce. the return on his

Capitalism in America: A History

by Adrian Wooldridge and Alan Greenspan · 15 Oct 2018 · 585pp · 151,239 words

to persuade William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize as the coinventor of the transistor, to move from Bell Labs to the park in 1955. Shockley was a difficult customer—an egomaniac in fact—who both attracted and repelled talent. Fairchild Semiconductor was formed in 1957 when “the traitorous eight” left Shockley Conductor because they

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, Intel, and Hewlett-Packard, were informal affairs. People hopped from job to job and from company to company. Intel was formed when two of the traitorous eight, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, left Fairchild and recruited Andy Grove to join them. More than anywhere else in America, Silicon Valley was a living

The Everything Blueprint: The Microchip Design That Changed the World

by James Ashton · 11 May 2023 · 401pp · 113,586 words

resolved to quit. They needed a ringleader, and Noyce, who had been elevated to become a favoured manager, agreed to join them. The ‘Traitorous Eight’ – as the irate Shockley labelled them – served their notice in September 1957, gaining industry renown. ‘We didn’t realize at the time the legacy we’d leave,’ said

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Force in the war. Keen to expand into the hot area of transistors, Fairchild Camera and Instrument Company stumped up $1.5m to back the Traitorous Eight and, in late 1957, Fairchild Semiconductor was born. That was the easy part. There was no off-the-shelf technology of which to take advantage

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-up could have realistically hoped for. Fairchild’s great technological stride forward began in 1958 when Jean Hoerni, a Swiss engineer and one of the Traitorous Eight, was trying to improve the process for the transistors that would supply the US government’s Minuteman ballistic missiles. He proposed to protect them with

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of the IC was difficult to comprehend. One man who thought he could envisage the direction of travel was Gordon Moore. Another one of the Traitorous Eight, Moore was director of research and development (R&D) at Fairchild Semiconductor when he was asked by Electronics magazine to predict what would happen in

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marketer, who put vital funds into Apple and helped Jobs to develop a business plan. Arthur Rock, the legendary venture capitalist who had paired the Traitorous Eight’s ideas with Sherman Fairchild’s funds two decades earlier, invested too. He was intrigued by Markkula’s enthusiasm after Wozniak presented to Intel’s

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution

by Walter Isaacson · 6 Oct 2014 · 720pp · 197,129 words

–90) at Fairchild in 1960. Gordon Moore (1929– ) at Intel in 1970. Gordon Moore (far left), Robert Noyce (front center), and the other “traitorous eight” who in 1957 left Shockley to form Fairchild Semiconductor. Bob had a certain way of listening and staring. He would lower his head slightly and look up with

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, he would be able to buy it outright for $3 million. Dubbed “the traitorous eight,” Noyce and his posse set up shop just down the road from Shockley on the outskirts of Palo Alto. Shockley Semiconductor never recovered. Six years later, Shockley gave up and joined the faculty of Stanford. His paranoia deepened, and he

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the transistor and brought people to the promised land of Silicon Valley became a pariah who could not give a lecture without facing hecklers. The traitorous eight who formed Fairchild Semiconductor, by contrast, turned out to be the right people at the right place at the right time. The demand for transistors

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some gases could cause them to fizzle. So, too, might a sharp tap or bump. Jean Hoerni, a Fairchild physicist who was one of the traitorous eight, came up with an ingenious fix. On the surface of a silicon transistor, he would place a thin layer of silicon oxide, like icing atop

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immediately asked, “What took you so long?”28 ARTHUR ROCK AND VENTURE CAPITAL In the eleven years since he had assembled the deal for the traitorous eight to form Fairchild Semiconductor, Arthur Rock had helped to build something that was destined to be almost as important to the digital age as the

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public eleven years later.29 Arthur Rock took this concept west, ushering in the silicon age of venture capital. When he put together Noyce’s traitorous eight with Fairchild Camera, Rock and his company took a stake in the deal. After that, he realized that he could raise a fund of money

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that I’ve ever made that I was 100 percent sure would succeed,” he later claimed.31 When he had sought a home for the traitorous eight in 1957, he pulled out a single piece of legal-pad paper, wrote a numbered list of names, and methodically phoned each one, crossing off

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classmate Fayez Sarofim, Max Palevsky of Scientific Data Systems, and Rock’s old investment firm, Hayden, Stone. Most notably, the other six members of the traitorous eight, many of them now working at firms that would have to compete with this new one, were given a chance to invest. All did. Just

The Big Score

by Michael S. Malone · 20 Jul 2021

years of its publication. And yet the stories it told became part of the Valley’s mythology: Hewlett and Packard in the garage, the Fairchild Traitorous Eight, the birth of the semiconductor chip, Woz building the Apple I, the trade war with Japan, the death of the orchards and the rise of

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. Noyce, Shockley’s golden boy, was as disenchanted as the rest. The eight soon submitted their resignation en masse to a stunned, then enraged, Bill Shockley. He called them traitors—and “the Traitorous Eight” is how they are known—and wouldn’t speak to any

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just couldn’t seem to get anything out the door, finally blew the place apart. It was years before Shockley forgave any of the Traitorous Eight, particularly Bob Noyce, who had been Shockley’s favorite. Noyce says, “I remember his wife talking to Betty, my first wife, when we were all leaving and

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that has made Robert Noyce a rich and famous man. But at the time, having walked out of Shockley Labs with the rest of the Traitorous Eight, Noyce found himself almost by default taking over Shockley’s role at the new company, Fairchild. How he did in this new role in comparison to that

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HP on one extreme or Shockley Labs on the other, was the freewheeling, throttle-to-the-firewall business style of Silicon Valley forged, its best-known personalities formed. So, to appreciate Silicon Valley, one must first understand the original Fairchild. * * * It was September 1957, and the Traitorous Eight had just quit the greatest

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in 1944) Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corp., the latter the parent of Fairchild Semiconductor. By the time Fairchild Camera and Instrument was approached by the Traitorous Eight, Sherman Fairchild was 60 years old and his interests had moved beyond the day-to-day operation of his firms, instead focusing on other responsibilities

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for young Fairchild. The big event of the year was Fairchild’s decision regarding a buyout. Needless to say they bit, for $3 million. The Traitorous Eight each found themselves suddenly holding $250,000 in Fairchild Camera and Instrument stock—and thought themselves rich beyond their wildest dreams. But what seemed at

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Carbide Electronics building, not far from Fairchild in Mountain View. UCE was one of the companies that had been founded by another member of the Traitorous Eight with Moore and Noyce, the prolific entrepreneur Jean Hoerni, and had moved to San Diego in 1967. Now it was home to a second Fairchild

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half dozen other gate array firms springing up in Silicon Valley, including SPI, one of the latest of Jean Hoerni’s (one of the original Shockley Traitorous Eight) endless number of new companies. SPI, in a slight departure from the Valley garage myth, started up in a house trailer. These new firms

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ingredient Silicon Valley added to the mix was a new kind of legitimacy to starting one’s own company. Hewlett and Packard started it, the Shockley Traitorous Eight set the rules, the semiconductor founders like Sporck and Sanders made it legitimate, and the T-shirt tycoons like Bushnell and Jobs made entrepreneuring the

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Stealing Tolerant Systems, 317 Tourney, Ed, 210, 213 Toy market, 244–45 Trade press, 368–69 Trade secrets, theft of, 264 See also Japanscam scandal Traitorous Eight, 94, 104, 113–14, 119, 165, 169, 306 Tramiel, Jack, 327–29, 394–95 Transformers, 220 Transistors, 92, 93, 143, 226, 228, 229 development

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future

by Sebastian Mallaby · 1 Feb 2022 · 935pp · 197,338 words

young PhD researchers rose up in revolt and went out on their own. Shockley’s seniority, his fame, and even his Nobel Prize did nothing to deter the rebels; the “Traitorous Eight” were fed up with Shockley’s heavy-handed leadership and resolved to find a different home. It was that act of

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a conventional bank loan but who promised the chance of a resounding payoff to investors with a taste for audacious invention. The funding of the Traitorous Eight and their company, Fairchild Semiconductor, was arguably the first such adventure to take place on the West Coast, and it changed the history of

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mark on an industrial culture, making Silicon Valley the most durably productive crucible of applied science anywhere, ever. Thanks to venture capital, the Traitorous Eight were able to abandon William Shockley, launch Fairchild Semiconductor, and set this miracle in motion. By 2014, an astonishing 70 percent of the publicly traded tech companies in

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paying the agreed $3 million for all of Fairchild Semiconductor’s stock.[101] For Noyce and his co-founders, it was a bittersweet moment. The Traitorous Eight each received $300,000, fully six hundred times what they had invested two years previously; the bonanza amounted to around thirty years’ salary. But at

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It was about forging a new kind of applied science and a new commercial culture. Chapter Two Finance Without Finance If liberation capital launched the Traitorous Eight and Fairchild Semiconductor, the following decade brought two further advances that forged the modern venture-capital profession. First, technology investors embraced the idea of

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earlier and more instinctively than Noyce did, and it was Rock who ensured that West Coast egalitarianism triumphed. Ever since his first meeting with the Traitorous Eight, Rock had grasped that owning a stake in their company was powerfully motivating to the scientists: that was why he had structured Fairchild Semiconductor

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the East Coasters loyally, but Rock quickly sensed that the magic of the company had been spoiled. His favorite hiking companions, two members of the Traitorous Eight named Jay Last and Jean Hoerni, griped about the changes at Fairchild, airing their resentment at the fact that they no longer owned shares.

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corporate overlords not once but repeatedly, the fate of Fairchild’s corporate venture bet was sealed. Last and Hoerni soon persuaded two more of the Traitorous Eight, Sheldon Roberts and Eugene Kleiner, to follow them to Teledyne, where they too were rewarded with suitable grants of stock.[57] More defections followed,

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venture operation of the Rockefeller family, which was about to make up for its shaky debut in the industry. The six other members of the Traitorous Eight bought shares, and Robert Noyce saw to it that his small alma mater, Grinnell College, was invited to participate.[64] Meanwhile, Sherman Fairchild was

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Friday morning in the summer of 1972, Perkins showed up for breakfast at Rickey’s Hyatt House in Palo Alto, the hotel where the Traitorous Eight had toasted Shockley’s Nobel Prize and later celebrated their liberation. Suitably enough, the purpose of the breakfast was to meet Eugene Kleiner, the traitor who had

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my birthday or anything,” Valentine said later. The visitors got straight to the point. Sandy Lerner had to go. Otherwise, in an echo of the Traitorous Eight, Cisco’s senior team would quit together.[83] The meeting concluded in less than an hour. When his visitors were gone, Valentine phoned Morgridge. “

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emerging from U.S. graduate programs were itching to launch technology startups. They had business ideas, technical training, and relentless ambition. But, like the Traitorous Eight in California half a century earlier, they lacked an obvious source of capital. They were not going to get it from a Chinese bank, because

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History Museum, Dec. 20, 2016, computerhistory.org/blog/fairchild-and-the-fairchildren. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 12 The quotation is from Robert Noyce, later the Traitorous Eight’s leader. See T. R. Reid, The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution (New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks,

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the Microchip, 78. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 81 Berlin, Man Behind the Microchip, 81. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 82 In his classic essay on the Traitorous Eight, Tom Wolfe wrote of Noyce’s “100 ampere eyes.” Wolfe, “Tinkerings of Robert Noyce.” BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 83 Rock, author interviews. See also

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NOTE REFERENCE 89 Berlin, Man Behind the Microchip, 85. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 90 Malone, Intel Trinity, 14–15. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 91 At Shockley, the Traitorous Eight had each earned between $8,100 and $12,000. Berlin, Man Behind the Microchip, 86. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 92 Fairchild Camera and Instrument

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30, 1960, Rock personal archive. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 22 Rock, interview by the author, Jan. 30, 2018. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 23 Of the Traitorous Eight who founded Fairchild, only Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore did not invest. As the two most senior executives at Fairchild, they were barred from placing

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listed venture vehicle. 1957 Reid Dennis forms “the Group,” a club of San Francisco brokers that backs technology startups. 1957 Arthur Rock finances the “Traitorous Eight,” creating Fairchild Semiconductor and kick-starting the West Coast chip industry. 1958 The U.S. federal government begins to subsidize venture funds known as Small

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of more than 22x, outperforming both Warren Buffett and the hedge-fund pioneer Alfred Winslow Jones. 1968 Rock finances Intel, helping two members of the Traitorous Eight repeat the defection of 1957. 1972 American Research and Development closes, signaling the triumph of Rock’s West Coast venture model. 1972 Don Valentine,

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a veteran of Fairchild Semiconductor, establishes Sequoia Capital. 1972 Eugene Kleiner, a member of the Traitorous Eight, teams up with Hewlett-Packard executive Tom Perkins to found Kleiner Perkins. 1973 Sutter Hill pairs the inventor of the electronic printing wheel with a

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39, 41 Fairchild Semiconductor, 38–39, 52–55, 60, 392 after-tax earnings, 38, 421n employee stock ownership, 36–37, 45, 46, 54 founding by Traitorous Eight, 17–18, 21, 28, 35–39, 53, 67, 423n Wolfe’s account of, 52–53, 56, 57 fake news, 14, 188, 380, 388 Federal

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, Jr., 3 Kirby, Bob, 61 Kleiner, Eugene, 98 Apple investment, 82, 83 founding of Kleiner Perkins, 67–69 retirement of, 122 Teledyne and, 54 Traitorous Eight and, 24, 31–32, 34–36, 54 Kleiner, Rose, 31 Kleiner Perkins (KP), 60, 67–80, 92, 377–78 activist investing of, 60, 66–69

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208, 209, 211–15, 444n Levchin and PayPal, 199–200 Novell, 186–87 Noyce, Robert, 52–57 background of, 52 Intel and Rock, 55–57 Traitorous Eight and founding of Fairchild, 34–39, 53, 54–55, 423n Wolfe’s account of, 52–53, 56, 57 Nozad, Pejman, 315–16 O Obama,

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Ctrip, 237–38, 243, 285 Meituan, 243–48 Shleifer, Scott, 278–88 Sina, Sohu, and NetEase, 279–82 Shockley, William, 17, 21–24, 31–32, 67 Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory, 21–24, 31–33, 41 Traitorous Eight and, 17–18, 21, 25, 28, 31–33, 53, 67, 423n Shopify, 332–33 “short,” 283 Shriram, Ram

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Tilbury, Charlotte, 332 Time (magazine), 12, 20, 150, 339 Tokopedia, 324 Torvalds, Linus, 20 Toshiba, 94 Toys “R” Us, 64 TPG Capital, 358, 360 Traitorous Eight, 17–18, 21, 25, 28, 31–39, 53, 67, 423n Treybig, Jimmy, 69–72, 86, 102 T. Rowe Price, 289, 346, 349 Trump, Donald, 402

Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation

by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber · 29 Oct 2024 · 292pp · 106,826 words

and inventor Sherman Fairchild. 218 At the last minute, an eighth member of the Shockley lab, Robert Noyce, joined the meeting. They called themselves the “California group.” William Shockley referred to them by a harsher, more memorable name: the “traitorous eight.” 219 The name stuck. Equipped with a team, a budget, and an agreement

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product had been invented a few months earlier, some 1,500 miles away in Dallas, Texas. Overthrowing the tyranny of numbers, in parallel While the traitorous eight were busy setting up shop in the Bay Area, a small firm in Dallas purchased a license to build transistors from Bell Labs and began

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of the industry’s sales from the 1950s through the early ’60s—this was a potential disaster. Back in 1955, Jean Hoerni, one of the traitorous eight, borrowed an idea from Bell Labs to tackle the problem of water vapor contaminating the process used to manufacture integrated circuits. Using what they referred

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. By the mid-1970s, chips were revolutionizing existing products and enabling unique use cases for NASA and the military. Jay Last, a member of the traitorous eight, called them “the vitamins of the entire industrial system,” 225 while commentators in Japan referred to them as “the rice of industry.” 226 But the

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lead and later political struggles, spawned the “Fairchildren,” as different managers with different strengths left the company to start their own firms. Three of the traitorous eight departed to start Amelco, the first pure-play integrated circuit company. A flamboyant Fairchild salesman, Jerry Sanders, left to cofound AMD. Engineer Charlie Sporck took

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

by Margaret O'Mara · 8 Jul 2019

to his inheritance of a massive amount of IBM stock. The eight scientists of Shockley became the founding employees—and shareholders—of a new company called Fairchild Semiconductor.24 Modern Silicon Valley started with Fairchild and the “Traitorous Eight” who founded it. Financed by an eccentric trust-funder in a deal brokered by

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legend to set out on their own. But it turned out that their timing could not have been better. A mere three days after the Traitorous Eight officially incorporated their company, the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite. CHAPTER 3 Shoot the Moon Eighteen thousand miles per hour. That was the orbiting

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LITTLE COMPANIES This was what happened to Fairchild Semiconductor. Three months into their start-up’s existence, without having yet made a single chip, the Traitorous Eight landed a contract to manufacture 100 silicon transistors for an onboard computer for “the manned missile,” a new long-range bomber. Wisely, Bob Noyce and

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large target would appear on its back. Netscape was Silicon Valley in miniature: funded by a venture capital enterprise started by one of the original Traitorous Eight; represented by the Valley’s most iconic law firm; its executive ranks filled by Valley veterans. Never mind that—for all the years of fierce

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, 2000, IEEE History Center, https://ethw.org/Oral-History:James_Gibbons, archived at http://perma.cc/6Z4M-MHMG. The story of the transistor, Shockley Semiconductor, and the “Traitorous Eight” has been explored by a number of authors, most originally and notably in two biographies: Leslie Berlin, The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce

Microchip: An Idea, Its Genesis, and the Revolution It Created

by Jeffrey Zygmont · 15 Mar 2003

Kleiner, Jay Last, and Sheldon Roberts. Six held Ph.D.s. Two were mechanical engineers. Bill Shockley branded the group the traitorous eight. But in fact, the desertion by his star thinkers was really just another Shockley first. Just as the Bulldog himself set a certain high standard for the elan and esprit that

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to a company as it foundered. In Palo Alto, the Shockley Semiconductor Lab limped forward 32 MICROCHIP for a little while after the traitorous eight departed. An outfit called Clevite Transistor purchased it from Shockley in 1960. The doors closed for good in 1969. Shockley found residence as a senior don of science at Stanford

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U.S. Senate as an advocate of controlled human breeding. Bill Shockley died from cancer in 1989. He had accomplished his life's work early, first by his semiconductor discoveries of the 1940s, then through the magnetism that pulled together the traitorous eight in '56 and '57. Technoscenti who encountered him even briefly

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of his Camera and Equipment company. Its collateral was the option to purchase the semiconductor operation outright, should Fairchild Semiconductor become successful. Each of the traitorous eight founders received ten percent ownership in the tenuous new venture, with the final twenty percent share going to Hayden, Stone & Company, the investment bank

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transistors, 13 Type 502 Solid Circuit, 58 Three-in-one microchip, 216 TI. See Texas Instruments "The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce" (Wolfe), 43 Toshiba, 153 "Traitorous eight," 31 Transistor radios, 78-79, 149. See also Radios Transistors, 7-8, 10, 12-14, 16, 23-39, 41^12, 50-52, 95-98,

On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything

by Nate Silver · 12 Aug 2024 · 848pp · 227,015 words

salary—but not for equity in the company or anywhere near the value he was generating for his bosses. Eventually, eight of Shockley’s engineers quit. The so-called Traitorous Eight joined a rival firm named Fairchild Semiconductor, which had been founded by the businessman Sherman Fairchild and an early pioneer of “adventure

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the semiconductor high stakes…an engineer would reach his middle thirties and wake up one day—and he was finished. The game was over.” The Traitorous Eight had also helped to establish another Silicon Valley tradition: lack of loyalty to incumbent players. California, from the Gold Rush onward, has always been a

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place for people who seek their own way. No, the Traitorous Eight were not countercultural figures, even as hippie culture was taking root in other parts of the Bay Area like Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury. But the

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the hive mind of engineers like him, as much as any queen-bee CEO, who will determine the course of AI. Dating back to the Traitorous Eight, Silicon Valley engineers are famously disloyal: the hive will not necessarily follow any Sam X, Y, or Z. Google, for instance, despite having invented the

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for the process of choosing the parameters in a regression analysis, but techniques like these involve far more human intervention than machine learning. Traitorous Eight: Eight engineers who quit Shockley Semiconductor in 1957 to found a rival firm, Fairchild Semiconductor—a pivot point in Silicon Valley for initiating a legacy of entrepreneurship among

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time horizon, 499 tokens (AI), 435, 436, 499 tokens (cryptocurrency), 499 Torres, Émile, 380n, 381, 455 total (over-under), 184, 499 training (machine learning), 499 Traitorous Eight, 257, 258, 499 transformers (AI), 414–15, 434–41, 479, 499 transhumanism, 379, 499 trimmed mean, 499 Trinity Test, 499 trolley problem, 345–46, 346