Today in 1968, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore founded microprocessor manufacturer NM Electronics in Santa Clara, California.
In deciding on a name, Moore and Noyce quickly rejected "Moore Noyce," homophone for "more noise" – an ill-suited name for an electronics company. Instead, they used the name NM (Noyce and Moore) Electronics before renaming their company Integrated Electronics or "Intel" for short.
From an interview of Gordon Moore and Arthur Rock, the venture capitalist who was the first to invest in Intel, by John C. Hollar and Douglas Fairbairn, published in a special issue of Core, the Computer History Museum’s publication:
Hollar: Was it an intimidating idea to think that the two of you would leave Fairchild?
Moore: Not especially. We belonged to the culture of the Valley that failure is something that, if it happens to occur, you can start all over again. There’s no stigma attached to being a failure. And we had had enough success at Fairchild. We were reasonably confident we knew what we were doing.
Hollar: There was a famous one page proposal, wasn’t there?—that was drafted to explain what the nature—
Rock: It was three pages, double-spaced. Some of the investors wanted to have something in their files. So I wrote this three-page double-spaced memo. It didn’t say anything.
Moore: I didn’t realize you had written it. I thought Bob [Noyce, Intel’s co-founder] did.
Rock: No, I did. I think Bob would have been more specific.
Moore: Probably. It was rather nebulous what we were gonna do.
Fairbairn: Did you have a specific product in mind?
Moore: Well, semiconductor memory. And we went after that with three different technological approaches. I refer to it now as our “Goldilocks Strategy.” But one of them, by fortune and accident, was just difficult enough. When we were focusing on it, we could get by the two or three rather serious problems that had to be solved. But we ended up, then, with a monopoly of about seven years before anybody else got over on the silicon gate mos [metal oxide semiconductor] transistor structure that we were using. So it really worked out beautifully. Luck plays a significant role in these things. It was just a very lucky choice.
Everything we associate with today’s Silicon Valley was already there: No stigma attached to failure, audacious risk taking, willing investors, creating (temporary) monopolies, and lots of luck. Arthur Rock was a personal friend (another attribute of today’s Silicon Valley) but he also convinced others, with his 3-page memo (or 3 paragraphs?) and his own $10,000, to invest an additional $2.5 million in the “nebulous” idea of the two entrepreneurs. Moore’s 1965 prediction (which became known later as “Moore’s Law”), probably also helped convince the other investors that they are betting their money on a technology with a guaranteed exponential future.
Intel went public in 1971, raising $6.8 million.