“That’s his legacy,” said Arthur Rock, an early investor in Intel and friend of Mr. Moore’s. “It’s not Intel. It’s not the Moore Foundation. It’s that phrase: Moore’s Law.”
Gordon Earl Moore was born on Jan. 3, 1929, in San Francisco. He grew up in Pescadero, a small coastal town south of San Francisco, where his father, Walter H. Moore, was deputy sheriff and the family of his mother, the former Florence Almira Williamson, ran the general store.
Mr. Moore enrolled at San Jose State College (now San José State University), where he met Betty Whitaker, a journalism student. They married in 1950. That year, he completed his undergraduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, with a degree in chemistry. In 1954, he received his doctorate, also in chemistry, from the Caltech.
One of the first jobs he applied for was as a manager with Dow Chemical. “They sent me to a psychologist to see how this would fit,” Mr. Moore wrote in 1994. “The psychologist said I was OK technically but I’d never manage anything.”
So Mr. Moore took a position with the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland. Then, looking for a way back to California, he interviewed at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in Livermore, Calif. He was offered a job, “but I decided I didn’t want to take spectra of exploding nuclear bombs, so I turned it down,” he wrote.
Instead, in 1956, Mr. Moore joined William Shockley, the inventor of the transistor, to work at a West Coast division of Bell Laboratories, a start-up unit whose aim was to make a cheap silicon transistor.
But the company, Shockley Semiconductor, foundered under Mr. Shockley, who had no experience running a company. In 1957, Mr. Moore and Mr. Noyce joined a group of defectors who came to be known as “the traitorous eight.” With each putting in $500, along with $1.3 million in backing from the aircraft pioneer Sherman Fairchild, the eight men left to form the Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation, which became a pioneer in manufacturing integrated circuits.
