Free Hooking Up by Tom Wolfe Page B

bottom—and this was part of the Intel Culture—Noyce and Grove knew that penalties were very nearly useless. Things like report cards and Late Lists worked only if they stimulated self-discipline.
    The worst form of discipline at Intel was to be called on the Antron II carpet before Noyce himself. Noyce insisted on ethical behavior in all dealings within the company and between companies. That was the word people used to describe his approach, “ethical”; that and “moral.” Noyce was known as a very aggressive businessman, but he stopped short of cutting throats—and he never talked about revenge.
He would not tolerate peccadilloes such as little personal I’ll-reimburseit-on-Monday dips into the petty cash. Noyce’s Strong Silent stare, his Gary Cooper approach, could be mortifying as well as inspiring. When he was angry, his baritone voice never rose. He seemed like a powerful creature that only through the greatest self-control was refraining from an attack. He somehow created the impression that if pushed one more inch, he would fight. As a consequence he seldom had to. No one ever trifled with Bob Noyce.
    Noyce managed to create an ethical universe within an inherently amoral setting: the American business corporation in the second half of the twentieth century. At Intel there was good and there was evil, and there was freedom and there was discipline, and to an extraordinary degree employees internalized these matters, like members of Cromwell’s army. As the workforce grew at Intel, and the profits soared, labor unions, chiefly the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the Teamsters, and the Stationary Engineers Union, made several attempts to organize Intel. Noyce made it known, albeit quietly, that he regarded unionization as a death threat to Intel, and to the semiconductor industry generally. Labor-management battles were part of the ancient terrain of the East. If Intel was divided into workers and bosses, with the implication that each side had to squeeze its money out of the hides of the other, the enterprise would be finished. Motivation would no longer be internal; it would be objectified in the deadly form of work rules and grievance procedures. The one time it came down to a vote, the union lost out by the considerable margin of four to one. Intel’s employees agreed with Noyce. Unions were part of the dead hand of the past … Noyce and Intel were on the road to El Dorado.
    By the early 1970s Noyce and Moore’s 1103 memory chip had given this brand-new company an entire corner of the semiconductor market. But that was only the start. Now a thirty-two-year-old Intel engineer named Ted Hoff came up with an invention as important as Noyce’s integrated circuit had been a decade earlier: the microprocessor. The microprocessor was known as “the computer on a chip,” because
it put all the arithmetic and logic functions of a computer on a chip the size of the head of a tack. The possibilities for creating and using small computers now surpassed most people’s imagining, even within the industry. One of the more obvious possibilities was placing a small computer in the steering and braking mechanisms of a car that would take over for the driver in case of a skid or excessive speed on a curve.
    In Ted Hoff, Noyce was looking at proof enough of his hypothesis that out here on the electrical frontier the great flashes came to the young. Hoff was about the same age Noyce had been when he invented his integrated circuit. The glory was now Hoff’s. But Noyce took Hoff’s triumph as proof of a second hypothesis: If you created the right type of corporate community, the right type of autonomous congregation, genius would flower. Certainly the corporate numbers were flowering. The news of the microprocessor, on top of the success of the 1103 memory chip, nearly trebled the value of Intel stock from 1971 to 1973. Noyce’s own holdings were now worth $18.5 million. He was in