right|thumb|400px| From left to right: [[Gordon Moore, C. Sheldon Roberts, Eugene Kleiner, Robert Noyce, Victor Grinich, Julius Blank, Jean Hoerni and Jay Last (1960)]]

The traitorous eight was a group of eight employees who left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1957 to found Fairchild Semiconductor. William Shockley had in 1956 recruited a group of young Ph.D. graduates with the goal to develop and produce new semiconductor devices. While Shockley had received a Nobel Prize in Physics and was an experienced researcher and teacher, his management of the group was authoritarian and unpopular. George Smoot Horsley and Leopoldo B. Valdes (both from Bell Labs), and Richard Victor Jones (a fresh Berkeley graduate), the location provided limited enticement for new employees. The vast majority of semiconductor-related companies and professionals were based on the East Coast, so Shockley posted ads in The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune. Early respondents included Sheldon Roberts of Dow Chemical, Robert Noyce of Philco, and Jay Last, a former intern of Beckman Instruments. The newspaper campaign brought some three hundred responses, and fifteen people, including Gordon Moore and David Allison, Shockley himself recruited at a meeting of the American Physical Society.

Selection continued throughout 1956. Shockley was a proponent of social technologies (which later led him to eugenics) and asked each candidate to pass a psychological test, followed by an interview.

Blank, Last, Moore, Noyce, and Roberts started working in April–May, and Kleiner, Grinich, and Hoerni came during the summer. By September 1956, the lab had 32 employees, including Shockley. Each successful candidate had to negotiate his salary with Shockley. Kleiner, Noyce, and Roberts settled for $1,000 per month; the less-experienced Last got $675. Hoerni did not bother about his payment. Shockley set his own salary at $2,500 and made all salaries accessible to all employees.

{| class="wikitable collapsible"

!colspan=3 width=100% | Traitorous eight in 1956: education and work experience

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! Name and birth year !! Degree and education !! Work experience

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| || Mechanical engineer. BA from City College (New York, 1950). The reasons for this turn are unknown. According to Beckman's biographer, Shockley regarded his diode as an interesting scientific problem and chose it neglecting Beckman's commercial interests.

Bo Lojek, based on the archives of Shockley, believes that Shockley Labs never worked on bipolar transistors; that Shockley diodes were Shockley and Beckman's original target, for which Beckman Instruments received military R&D contracts; and that Shockley diodes could have found widespread use in telephony if Shockley had improved their reliability.

Frictions

<!--thumb|Staff of Shockley Labs celebrate the announcement of the Shockley's Nobel Prize award on November 2, 1956. Sitting, left to right: Moore, Roberts, Jones, Shockley. Standing: Noyce (center, dark suit), Last (far right). -->

Historians and colleagues generally agree that Shockley was a poor manager and businessman. He later co-founded and ran several companies developing industrial radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags.

Honors

In May 2011, the California Historical Society gave the "Legends of California Award" to The Eight. Blank, Last, Moore, and Roberts' son Dave attended the event in San Francisco. Tom Wolfe's 1983 profile of Noyce The spin-off companies, such as AMD, Intel, Intersil and restructured National Semiconductor, were different from those of the east coast and California's electronic companies established in the 1940s and 1950s. "Old Californians" like Beckman and Varian Associates did not trust Wall Street and kept control of their companies for decades, whereas the new companies of the 1960s were created for a quick (within 3–5 years) public sale of shares. Their founders built a business strategy based on the expectations of the investment banks. Another characteristic of Silicon Valley was the mobility of managers and professionals among companies. Partly because of Noyce, Silicon Valley developed a culture of openly denying the hierarchical culture of traditional corporations. People remained faithful to each other, but not to the employer or the industry. Fairchild "alumni" can be found not only in electronics-related but also financial and public relations companies.

See also

  • Chih-Tang Sah, another former employee under William Shockley who later joined Fairchild Semiconductor, where he co-developed CMOS along with Frank Wanlass while at Fairchild.
  • Mohamed Atalla, inventor of the MOSFET (MOS transistor), former Bell Labs employee who later joined Fairchild Semiconductor
  • PayPal Mafia, former PayPal employees who founded a number of technology companies

Notes

References

Bibliography

  • 1999 Computerworld interview with Eugene Kleiner, Julius Blank and Jay Last
  • Transistorized! (PBS)