Foundation in 1968
It all started in 1968, when Bob Noyce resigned as head of Fairchild Semiconductor taking along Gordon Moore and Andy Grove, to embark on a new venture. They had decided to leave the company, because they wanted "to regain the satisfaction of research and development in a small, growing company,") since Fairchild had become big with lots of bureaucracy work to be done. Gordon Moore had belonged to the famous Shockley Eight and was in charge of the R&D team at Fairchild. Andy Grove, a young Hungarian emigrè who had earned a doctorate in chemical engineering at U.C. Berkeley, had joined Fairchild in the early 1960s.
Intel (short for Integrated Electronics), a typical Fairchild spin-off, was financially backed by venture capital from Arthur Rock, who had been in contact with Noyce since 1957. The company was founded upon the idea of integrating many transistors on a ch ip of silicon, after Noyce had developed a new photochemical process. The three engineers initially focused on building the first semiconductor chips used for computer memory, which should replace the dominant memory storage technology at the time, called "magnetic core". Intel's task was to drive down the cost per bit by increasing the capacity of memory chips dramatically.