Catalysts for Change - Ethics for the Information Age - page 16

FIGURE 1.8 The eight founders of Fairchild Semiconductor on the factory floor. Gordon
Moore is second from the left and Robert Noyce is on the right. (Wayne Miller/Magnum
Photos, Inc.)
for the war effort, several American companies, including AT&T, greatly improved their
ability to create semiconductors [19].
AT&T was on the lookout for a new technology to replace the vacuum tube. Its long-
distance network relied on vacuum tubes to amplify signals, but the tubes required a lot
of power, generated a lot of heat, and burned out like lightbulbs. After the war, AT&T put
together a team of Bell Labs scientists, led by Bill Shockley, to develop a semiconductor
substitute for the vacuum tube. In 1948 Bell Labs announced the invention of such a
device, which they called the transistor [20].
While most electronics companies ignored the invention of the transistor, Bill
Shockley understood its potential. He left Bell Labs and moved to Palo Alto, California,
where he founded Shockley Semiconductor in 1956. He hired an exceptional team of en-
gineers and physicists, but many disliked his heavy-handed management style [20]. In
September 1957, eight of Shockley's most talented employees, including Gordon Moore
and Robert Noyce, walked out. The group, soon to be known as the “traitorous eight,”
founded Fairchild Semiconductor (Figure 1.8). By this time transistors were being used
in a wide variety of devices, from transistor radios to computers. While transistors were
far superior to vacuum tubes, they were still too big for some applications. Fairchild
Semiconductor set out to produce a single semiconductor device containing transis-
tors, capacitors, and resistors; in other words, an integrated circuit . Another firm, Texas
Instruments, was on the same mission. Today, Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconduc-