Mannerisms

Hoff, then a junior professor at Stanford University, remembers getting a call in the summer of 1968 from Bob Noyce who was setting up a new company, originally Noyce Moore Electronics, soon to be renamed Intel Corporation. Noyce was looking for R&D people.

"While I liked academia, there is something more significant when people put real money behind an idea," says Hoff, "I had had some taste of business - but with Intel here was a chance to see a start-up from the beginning. It struck me that it would be interesting to see what the real world was like."

"I was interviewed before Intel had a building," remembers Hoff, "I went to Bob Noyce's home for the interview."

"I had been talking to people in the semiconductor industry about what it would take to make semiconductor memory", recounts Hoff.

"Noyce asked me what I thought was the next area which semiconductor technology should explore."

Hoff's reply was semiconductor memory.

Noyce and Gordon Moore had resigned in July from Fairchild Semiconductor with the specific intention of pursuing semiconductor memory.

Not surprisingly, Hoff was hired. He was Intel's 12th employee. The company had been incorporated in July 1968 and Hoff joined in September.

"The day I joined was the same day Intel moved into its first building - 365 Middlefield Road, Mountain View", remembers Hoff, "it had been occupied by Union Carbide and they were still using half the building In the Union Carbide half, the heat from the diffusion furnaces had melted the overhead fluorescent lights - it looked terrible."

Hoff's first job at Intel was to be the manager for applications research. "The idea was to find applications for Intel's products", he recalls, " though we didn't have any at the time. Also we were doing research to define what products Intel should build."