Chip Letter Links No. 13: Andy Grove and the 80386

Great links, reading and images for 29 January 2023

Hi everyone and thanks for subscribing. This is one of a regular series of posts with links, images and articles of interest, inspired by Adam Tooze’s excellent Chartbook.

Each edition starts with a beautiful die image. This week we have an Intel 80386 (photo by Pdesousa359, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikipedia).

Andy Grove

Today’s edition focuses on Andy Grove and the Intel 80386 microprocessor.

Andy Grove (born András István Gróf in Budapest in 1936) was one of the most important figures in the semiconductor industry in the 20th century. He achieved this position whilst coming from a background that was incredibly challenging, to say the least:

By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis' "Final Solution," the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint...

Grove escaped from Hungary in 1956 and shortly afterwards made his way to the United States. Unable to speak English when he left Hungary, by 1960 he had gained a Batchelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from City College of New York and by 1963 a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from University of California, Berkeley. He would write about his experiences in his memoir Swimming Across.

Soon after Grove was working with Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore at Fairchild Semiconductor, and followed them to Intel in 1969. He would become Intel’s president in 1987 and then CEO in 1987, remaining chairman until 2004. Grove passed away in March 2016.

Although Grove was an expert in his technical field (whilst at Fairchild he wrote the textbook ‘Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices’) it’s really for his approach to management, developed during his time at Intel, that he has become famous.