From The Dawn Of Silicon Valley Until Today

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The year is 1955 and Bill Shockley has left Bell Labs to start his own company Shockley semiconductor.  At Bell, Shockley led the team that invented the transistor and he believed the future was in silicon transistors rather than the Germanium of the time.  Shockley chose the location of Mountain View California because it was close to his mother in Palo Alto.

Shockley recruited eight young scientists from all over the country to join him including Bob Noyce.  Shockley's poor people skills and abrasive demeanor lead the group to of eight to set off on their own in 1956 to start their own company.  The company is funded by Sherman Fairchild and called Fairchild Semiconductor.  Shockley called them the treacherous eight.

At Fairchild, Bob Noyce invented the integrated circuit in 1959 on which the entire tech industry is based.  The site is a California registered historical landmark.

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In 1960, Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng invented a type of transistor called MOSFET at Bell Labs.  Most ignored the invention, but Fairchild engineers took particular interest in it and developed and commercialized an integrated circuit using it called the MOS IC in 1964.  MOSFET allows for simpler more efficient IC production.

The MOSFET transistor has gone on to become the single most produced object man has ever created.  A new Iphone has 20 billion MOSFET transistors in it.

In a 1965 article for Electronics Magazine, Gordon Moore of Fairchild observed that the number of components on integrated circuits had doubled every year since their invention with little affect on price.  This statement has become known as Moore's law and has driven the tech industry to this day.  The observation was revised to doubling every two years in 1975.  Die shrinkage is the secret sauce of tech.  It's the reason it gets better every years.