In 2001, Intel was the world’s leading semiconductor manufacturer,
with revenues of $26.5 billion, and more than eighty-three thousand
employees working in eighty-plus countries worldwide. Despite its size,
the company is actually rather young. Gordon Moore and Robert
Noyce founded the company in 1968 and were soon joined by Andrew
Grove. These three founders were veterans of the fledgling semiconductor
industry and had worked together at Fairchild Semiconductor,
a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument. All three had left
Fairchild in part because of their dissatisfaction with how Fairchild was
running its semiconductor business.