Intel was founded July 18, 1968, by semiconductor pioneers Gordon Moore (of Moore’s law fame) and Robert Noyce and investor Arthur Rock. Intel’s employee #3 was Andrew Grove. Moore, Noyce, and Grove had all worked together at Fairchild Semiconductor in the mid 1960s.
The name “Intel” means INTegrated ELectronics. Moore and Noyce didn’t want to name the company after themselves, as it would sound like “more noise.” With noise being an undesired property in electronics, they initially chose the name NM Electronics, using their initials, but changed the name to Intel less than two weeks after its founding. Intel was already a trademark of a hotel chain, so the young company bought the rights to the name.
Intel’s IPO
Intel held its IPO on October 13, 1971, raising $6.8 million, or $23.50 per share. It was the very first company on the NASDAQ, a stock market known mostly for technology firms.
Intel played a large role in the rise of Silicon Valley as a high-tech center. Initially Intel was an early developer of SRAM and DRAM memory chips, and that represented the majority of its business until 1981. Although the company created the world’s first commercial microprocessor chip–the Intel 4004–in 1971, it was not until the widespread success of the PC in the early 1990s that CPUs became its primary business. Intel produced CPUs somewhat reluctantly at first, getting into them primarily out of a hope that inexpensive CPUs would help them sell more memory chips.
The transformation into a CPU company
By 1974 Intel had developed the 8-bit 8008 and quickly thereafter, in 1975, the 8080 processor. The 8080 became the core of the Altair, the product that launched the microcomputer revolution. Soon after came the 8086 16-bit microprocessor and a cost-reduced version, the 8088, which IBM chose for its IBM PC. In 1985, Intel produced the 32-bit 80386 microprocessor which began a long line of increasingly powerful microprocessors including the 80486, the Pentium, and a wide variety of supporting integrated circuits and computers built with them. The PC’s popularity turned x86 into a de facto standard.
With the 386 generation, Intel made the decision to stop second-sourcing its CPUs, becoming a sole source instead. This corresponded with then-CEO Gordon Moore deciding to shift focus to CPUs from memory devices in the face of stiff competition from Japanese RAM manufacturers.
With the inability to second-source the designs, other companies started to clone them. Intel litigated most of these early companies, such as Chips & Technologies and UMC, out of the market. Keeping upstarts out during the 486 and Pentium generation proved more difficult, but eventually the Pentium maker was able to use patents to eliminate essentially all but AMD. Yes, Zhaoxin exists selling chips in the Chinese market, but that’s largely for political reasons, not technical.
Intel Inside
The other hallmark of Intel’s glory days was its marketing. It positioned itself as a premium brand, telling you to look for their sticker, and sowing doubt on other chipmakers. It was effective. I worked places who for years wouldn’t even consider an AMD processor, never mind that in the days before CPUs, the conventional processor designs in enterprise-grade minicomputers were full of discrete logic chips made by AMD. And AMD was a reliable second source for IBM throughout the 1980s, not just for CPUs, but for virtually every other chip on the motherboard.
But AMD couldn’t afford to advertise, so they fell to off-brand status even though there was absolutely nothing wrong with the compatibility or reliability of their chips. Even the notorious Pentium FDIV bug did little to tarnish Intel’s reputation as the premium brand.
Today there’s less perception that there’s something wrong with buying AMD chips, largely because they executed with the Athlon 64 generation, then executed again on the Ryzen generation, keeping pace with Intel on performance and power consumption and sometimes exceeding them, because Intel’s lead in chip fabrication processes has eroded over time. There are still people who regard them as a premium brand and buy Intel out of habit. But the days of seeing Intel as the only choice seem to be waning, and it’s reflected in the company’s share price.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
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