The prime mover in getting AMD founded was not Jerry Sanders but Jack Gifford. Gifford, 28 years old when he left Fairchild, couldn't raise the money to get the company started.
Sanders, who had left Fairchild around the same time as Gifford, was eventually persuaded to join Gifford and try and raise the money.
Sanders drove a tough bargain: he had to be president, and the company had to be digital.
Gifford had wanted to found an analogue company.
Sanders raised the money and AMD was incorporated in May 1969.
But a lot of people in the founding group didn't get along with Sanders.
In his History of Semiconductor Engineering, Bo Lojek recounts that one day, during a row, Gifford grabbed Sanders, threw him into a chair, and shouted:
"Listen, you son of a bitch, a month ago everybody in this company came to me to get rid of you. If you do not change your ways you are going to be out of here."
Sanders went to the board and Gifford was fired the following week.
For a while, Gifford became a tomato farmer, then he founded Maxim.
So he eventually got his analogue company and it made him a fortune.
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