The First Design Aid

Hoff joined Intel in 1968 as employee No.12. "Intel was a very exciting place to be" remembers Hoff, “we started off developing two new processes - Schottky bipolar and silicon gate MOS. Developing a process is a horrendous task. It's like walking on the edge of a cliff - if you're not close enough to the edge you're not competitive; if you're too close you fall off. “

"There was a tremendous spirit - a sense of doing the impossible.", recalls Hoff, "Noyce wandered around chatting to everyone. In this kind of business you need to encourage a degree of creativity - you can't chain people to a bench and get them to crank out the numbers. Sometimes it's the oddest times when ideas come - the result of interactions between people - two people are discussing a problem and one of them asks the right question. "

"There was a very key invention at Intel at the same time as the microprocessor" recounts Hoff, "the fellow at the next bench to me - Dov Frohman - invented the EPROM. It seemed like the ideal thing for programme development. So I built an interface that allowed the microprocessor to read a programme out of EPROM. We made that available to customers - essentially it was the first design aid.”