Seldom are an industry's pioneers around to dispel or confirm legends that have grown up around them.
On Thursday night, three co-founders of the company that has come most closely to defining the birth of Silicon Valley -- Fairchild Semiconductor FCS -- did just that.
Legends have sprung up about Fairchild and its eight founders. William Shockley called them the "traitorous eight" after they left Shockley Semiconductor to found Fairchild in 1957.
At an event at Stanford University to celebrate the 50th anniversary, the trio confirmed that some of the legends are true and some aren't.
For example, one story has it that when Fairchild was to ship its first product, the staff hadn't thought to buy anything to ship it in. So they used a Brillo cleaning pad box.
"True," said co-founder Jay Last. He went to a store in August 1958 to get something the company could use to mail its first transistors, to customer IBM IBM. "I grew up in Pittsburgh and so did Andy Warhol. It's interesting that both of our careers depended on a Brillo box," he quipped. Warhol did a painting titled "Brillo Box" in 1964.
Last reminisced with co-founders Julius Blank and Gordon Moore.
Moore and one of the other eight, Robert Noyce, would later leave Fairchild to start a chipmaker called Intel INTC. Many Silicon Valley companies trace their lineage to former Fairchild founders and executives, a group that has come to be called "the Fairchildren."
Noyce is deceased, as are founders Eugene Kleiner, Jean Hoerni and Victor Grinich. Founder Sheldon Roberts didn't attend Thursday.
But venture capitalist Arthur Rock was on hand. Another legendary Silicon Valley figure, he introduced the eight to Sherman Fairchild, who backed them with $1.5 million in seed money. Fairchild Semiconductor started out as a unit of Fairchild Camera & Instrument.
Rock is one of the fathers of the venture capital industry and thus worthy of luminary status among the Fairchildren.
Besides co-founding Intel, Noyce, who died in 1990, is credited with inventing the integrated circuit while at Fairchild. (Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments TXN is also credited.)
Hoerni later founded Union Carbide Electronics. He died in January 1997. Grinich became a professor at Stanford University and wrote "Introduction to Integrated Circuits." He died in 2000.
Kleiner co-founded the venerable Valley venture firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. He died in 2003. Companies funded by Kleiner Perkins included Amazon.com AMZN, AOL, Genentech DNA, Google GOOG and Sun Microsystems JAVA.
Meanwhile, even the legends remember things differently. One rumor about Fairchild is that it ran into trouble because of poor management. (It eventually became part of another Fairchild offspring, National Semiconductor NSM, until managers bought the name and carried on to this day as Fairchild Semiconductor.)
"Fairchild Semiconductor had excellent management," Rock said.
"I think good products made up for bad management," Moore countered.
Then there's the rumor that Hoerni spit on the first transistor to show its durability. On that one, the panel was silent until Moore ventured: "I would suspect not."
Source: Investor's Business Daily
