Noyce, co-inventor of the integrated circuit, and Moore, the chemist behind the prediction now called Moore's law, had both left Fairchild, where they had been among the "traitorous eight" who founded it. With backing arranged by the investor Arthur Rock, they incorporated NM Electronics on July 18, 1968, and changed the name to Intel by the end of the month. Andy Grove, a chemical engineer, joined as the company's third employee.
Intel's first business was memory. Its first product, in 1969, was the 3101, a 64-bit static RAM chip nearly twice as fast as earlier competing designs. It was a quick entry into the small, high-speed memory market, and memory chips remained Intel's core business through the 1970s.
In 1971 Intel produced the 4004, the first commercially available microprocessor: an entire computer processor on a single chip. For years it remained a sideline. Only with the success of the IBM personal computer, built around an Intel processor, did microprocessors become the company's main business in the 1980s.
The name reflected the founders' original goal, the semiconductor memory market, which was widely predicted to replace magnetic-core memory. From three founders in Mountain View, Intel grew into one of the largest chipmakers in the world, and its processors went on to run the majority of the world's personal computers.
Key people: Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Arthur Rock