The Intel ID card of Bob Noyce, co-founder of Intel, from the Computer History Museum

Ann Bowers knew Bob Noyce, the “mayor of Silicon Valley,” better than anyone. She was married to the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, and witnessed the magnetic effect he had on the people who followed him to the region that will be chronicled in an American Experience history documentary on PBS on Tuesday (Feb. 5) at 8 pm. The film is called Silicon Valley: Where the Future Was Born, and it captures the people like Noyce, who died in 1990, and how they made such a mark that their impact is still reverberating today.

Last week, Bowers (pictured right) spoke about Noyce on stage at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., where the surviving pioneers of Silicon Valley gathered to celebrate the film and the man at the center of it. The event was a chance to hear about the living history of the technology era from some of the people who created it. Bowers tried to convey what it was like to be in the same room with Noyce, who had a magnetic personality. At the same time, he wasn’t a taskmaster and had to bring in Andy Grove, later the legendary CEO of Intel, to keep order.

Noyce isn’t depicted as some superhero, since he had his flaws. But, like David Packard and Bill Hewlett before him, he was a very big part of the fuel that set the valley on fire. To grow like it did, Silicon Valley need a visionary like Noyce, a researcher-like co-founder Gordon Moore, and a tough guy like Grove — they were all there at the critical time. Noyce’s efforts shaped the technology, business, money, politics, and culture of Silicon Valley. Bowers brought Noyce down to the human level.

At the start of the event, host Hari Sreenivasan asked Bowers about the many talents of Noyce. He played the oboe. He was the state diving champion. He lettered on the swim team. He was in the drama club. And he knew more about transistors than just about anyone on the planet. Bowers smiled and answered a quick “yes” to each one of the facts.

“How is this possible, where did that confidence come from?” Sreenivasan asked.

“It’s important to understand the kind of family that Bob came from,” Bowers said. “His father was a congregation minister. There were four boys. They had very little by way of financial resources. But they had a lot of other resources. They were a tight family. They worked hard. Respected others. They were generous. And they took care of themselves. By their own effort. That was where a lot of Bob’s attitudes came from.”

Asked about Noyce’s “halo effect” and magnetism, Bowers laughed and said, “Well he did, obviously! He could project that from the podium. He seemed like he was talking directly at you. You might feel like he was talking to you and you were the only person in the room. He had that ability. He was listening. He was not talking at you. He was talking with you.”

Noyce grew up in Grinnell, a small town in Iowa, in a world without electronics except for ham radios and the equipment used to operate a farm. While his father was religious, Noyce was an agnostic. He and the other migrants to California’s Santa Clara Valley shared “middle American values,” said Michael S. Malone, a longtime Silicon Valley author, speaking in the film.

“They were honest, good as a handshake,” he said. “They were small town and masters of the universe. That tension drove these guys on.”

The film tries to convey the “sense of possibilities, the risk taking, and the moment in time that allowed Silicon Valley to happen,” said Randy Maclowry (pictured left, on far left), director of the film. “They found themselves at the right place and the right time, and they had the technological chops and understanding of what was possible to take the risks.”

Noyce had migrated to the Santa Clara Valley to work for William Shockley, the Nobel-prize winning physicist who co-invented the transistor and moved West to Palo Alto, Calif., to set up Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory — and be near his mother.

Asked what Noyce would have thought about technology today, Bowers said he would have appreciated all of the access to information that we have today with the internet.

Bowers arrived at Intel in January, 1970.

“What was so profound about Bob and Intel was the sense that it was all about a challenge and discovery,” she said. “It wasn’t about making a lot of money or having a lot of power. You see challenges, and you see opportunities.”

Noyce was married to Elizabeth Bottomly in 1953, but they were divorced. Noyce and Bowers got married in 1974. Bowers introduced Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, to Noyce. Jobs was looking around for a mentor. He hit it off with Noyce, and they talked about all sorts of ideas. Bowers found Jobs to be “extremely annoying because he was so self-centered.” She said Jobs’ parents didn’t seem to know what to do with him because he was a genius who needed someone to talk to.

“They would talk about almost anything,” Bowers said.

Noyce wasn’t a follow-through guy, and he wasn’t good at being tough on people. That was why Noyce and Moore brought in Andy Grove, Bowers said.

Bowers drew the biggest laugh of the evening when she said, “I can’t imagine Bob tweeting.”

Noyce loved cars and the most modern cameras. He felt a lot of the things he was interested in were made better by the integrated circuits he created. He was proud that chips formed the heart of a personal computer, which was an “everyman’s tool.”

Bowers held jobs such as director of personnel for Intel, and she was the first vice president of  human resources for Apple. She currently serves as the chair of the Noyce Foundation.

By the end of his career, Noyce had organized efforts such as the Semiconductor Industry Association and Sematech to ensure that U.S., which was in stiff competition with Japan, was able to hold on to its technological edge, educate its next generation of engineers, and make sure that semiconductor jobs stayed in the country. While nations such as China, Korea, and Japan have risen on the global stage, the United States is still the largest country in terms of market share in the chip business in the world. You can thank Noyce for a lot of that, and you shouldn’t miss this film.

Here’s a snippet of the video of Ann Bowers on stage with Hari Sreenivasan, a host of the PBS News Hour.

Andy Grove ran Intel as CEO for many years. Gordon Moore co-founded Intel with Bob Noyce.

The pioneers of Silicon Valley gathered for a rare reception last night for the debut of a film about them. The film is a rare documentary with the highest production values, featuring the real revolutionaries who changed the world (as opposed to the silly kids from Bravo’s Start-ups: Silicon Valley reality TV show).

Source: Dean Takahashi

Federico Faggin, co-inventor of the microprocessor

The documentary, Silicon Valley: Where the Future Was Born, will run on TV as part of PBS’s American Experience history series. Some of the luminaries gathered at the event were Gordon Moore (above right), co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel; Andy Grove (above left), former chief executive of Intel; Arthur Rock, the venture capitalist who funded Intel; marketing wizard Regis McKenna; Les Vadasz, the earliest employee at Intel; and Ted Hoff (below left) and Federico Faggin (right), co-inventors of the first microprocessor.

Source: Dean Takahashi

Ted Hoff, co-inventor of the microprocessor

The film chronicles the formation of the semiconductor industry in the 1950s and 1960s in Santa Clara County, the region from Palo Alto to San Jose that became the heart of Silicon Valley and a regional technology ecosystem that spans nine counties in the San Francisco Bay Area. The film airs on PBS at 8 pm on Tuesday Feb. 5.

Hari Sreenivasan, a host at the PBS News Hour, hosted the event and invited the pioneers on stage at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. The museum and Intel hosted the event, but the film was fair enough to include all of the pioneers from rival companies, including Charlie Sporck, longtime chief of National Semiconductor, and Jerry Sanders, founder of Intel arch rival Advanced Micro Devices. All of the companies grew up in the same region and became multinational juggernauts of the electronic age. But many also faltered and died along the way.

Mark Samels, executive producer of the American Experience, said in front of the crowd, “It’s sort of like doing a film on the founding fathers with Adams and Jefferson in the room.”

For me, it was a reminder of what is great about Silicon Valley, where the founding pioneers are still living among us.

The film tries to convey the “sense of possibilities, the risk taking, and the moment in time that allowed Silicon Valley to happen,” said Randy Maclowry, director of the film.

I walked around the reception and snapped pictures of the people who were responsible for the beginnings all of the devices that we now take for granted. My kids don’t even know this ancient history, so the film, narrated by authors Michael S. Malone and Leslie Berlin, comes at an important time. It captures history before those who made it have all passed away.

Bob Noyce, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel, died in 1990. But he is very much the central figure of the film. He founded Fairchild with the “traitorous eight” defectors who left William Shockley’s Shockley Laboratories. Shockley won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the transistor, but he became increasingly “erratic.” So Noyce led the team (pictured below, with Noyce in front) to start Fairchild.

Fairchild was in the right place at the right time. In 1957, the Russians scared America with the launch of the first satellite, Sputnik. President Eisenhower created NASA within the next year and launched the American space program. Fairchild was positioned to make the chips that would go into the rockets and space ships.

The traitorous eight, with Bob Noyce in the foreground. They founded Fairchild Semiconductor.

But first, the team had to create working chips. Noyce was so charismatic that he landed a contract with IBM, promising to deliver 100 chip prototypes to them — even though those chips hadn’t been designed yet. Texas Instruments gave Fairchild some serious competition, stunning them with a patent for the “integrated circuit,” which packed together transistors and other components in an electronic system in a single chip. But Noyce and Jean Hoerni created designs that made the integrated circuit practical. The companies came to blows in court over the invention, but it was settled after a decade. By that time, TI was using Hoerni’s planar process to manufacture integrated circuits.

In contrast to Shockley’s dictatorship, Noyce and co-founder Gordon Moore gave out stock options and managed in a way that was more egalitarian, building a company based on meritocracy. They infused this egalitarianism in the rest of the Valley, which came to be a collection of many companies that spun out of Fairchild. Noyce and Moore, fed up with the East Coast management of Fairchild, spun out themselves, forming Intel in 1968.

Moore and Noyce were brilliant at science and management, but Intel’s task master was Andy Grove, who got the operations working to churn out chips in highly specialized factories. He instilled some serious, military-style discipline that included “late lists” for those who showed up late in the morning. Intel created cutting edge chips that helped make Silicon Valley the world leader in electronics. The work included the designs of Federico Faggin and Ted Hoff, inventors of the 4004, Intel’s first microprocessor, which hit the market in 1971. The chip had 2,300 transistors. Decades later, chip makers like Intel can put multiple billions of transistors on a chip. That is why we can access Facebook at blazing speeds from mobile devices.

A reproduction of the famous dollar bill signed by the traitorous eight

The film footage includes women who were on the assembly line, like Ginger Jenkins, who had the dexterity to assemble chips with tiny wires. But the 1950s-era Silicon Valley was a place where men ruled the companies and gathered at bars such as Walker’s Wagon Wheel. They traded tips over drinks, and the Valley quickly became a place where there were few real secrets.

The film starts with the Shockley defectors, who gathered at the Clift Hotel in San Francisco for a meal. They were ready to follow the charismatic Noyce, a brilliant scientist and a Pied Piper for talent. They signed their names on dollar bills (pictured right) to seal their contract.

If Noyce was the father of Silicon Valley — alongside David Packard and Bill Hewlett — then the “Fairchildren” were the ones who scattered to the winds and created the startup culture that became the Valley that’s famous around the world today.

Ann Bowers, Noyce’s widow, said the egalitarian attitude came from Noyce’s belief that you should respect people. She recalled how Noyce often talked late into the night with the young Steve Jobs as he was starting Apple. If Noyce were alive today, Bowers said, he would have been very interested in all of the medical devices chips are enabling.

“I can’t imagine Bob tweeting,” she said.