Hacker Culture A to Z

Chapter 6. F

Facebook

See “Meta”, “Zuckerberg, Mark”

Fairchild Semiconductor

William Bradford Shockley Jr. (1910–1989) was a brilliant inventor, but a terrible boss. In 1947 at Bell Labs, he helped to invent the transistor, one of the most revolutionary inventions of the 20th century. It’s used in all kinds of electronics, including televisions and radios, and it revolutionized electronic computers.

One of the earliest programmable electronic computers, ENIAC, started operating in 1945, and it used lots and lots of vacuum tubes that had to be replaced constantly. Transistors were the perfect upgrade. Like vacuum tubes, they make an electric signal go on (1 in binary) or off (0 in binary). But transistors are much smaller, much more efficient, and much more durable. They made electronics of all kinds more practical, smaller, and more affordable.

The next big revolution was to put lots and lots of little transistors on one chip—a type of semiconductor called an integrated circuit. (A CPU is a type of integrated circuit, and all of our modern computers are based on them.)

In 1955, Shockley founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. He and his team were brilliant, but Shockley didn’t know how to manage people. So eight of his employees—the “Traitorous Eight” (Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce, Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, and Sheldon Roberts)—decided to form their own semiconductor company. With their combined financial contributions and a loan ...