Report to the Computer History Museum on the Information Technology Corporate Histories Project
SemiconductorSector
"Charlie Sporck who had been General Manager of the business left to form National. Charlie
hired me, he thinks he hired me. He made me an offer to be his Vice President of Marketing
Worldwide and I said I couldn't do that without telling the people at Fairchild first. And they
persuaded me that someday I would be the president of Fairchild, that there was no limit to where
I could go. They laid some more stock options on me and I made the mistake of staying. Turns
out it was the right thing to do as life worked out, but I didn't know it at the time. Any way Charlie
Sporck, basically thought I had made a terrible mistake and he found out that the reason I had
decided to stay was that, I had misspoken up until now. I wasn't yet the Worldwide Marketing
Director. I was a sales manager and I said I wanted to be the Worldwide Director. If I would have
joined Charlie I would have been, but I said I wasn't going to stay on and not be. Well there was a
problem because there was already a Worldwide Marketing Director at Fairchild named Don
Valentine, who was a good friend. But I said, you know, Don's there and I'm behind Don and I
don't want to wait. And Tom Bay said well how much time will you give me? And in my brash
youth I said, 'till Friday. And I think this was on a Monday. And on Friday Don was terminated and
I was made Worldwide Marketing Director. I was shocked. So there I was at, you know, 30 years
old, 31 years old, and wow, just had the world as my oyster.
But as it turns out Fairchild had to change managements, you know, Charlie Sporck left, Tom Bay
was promoted, it didn't work out. They brought in a whole team of guys. Lester Hogan of Hogan's
Heroes. Very interesting time. C. Lester Hogan is a brilliant guy and he'd made Motorola quite a
success by automating the production of transistors, but of course transistors were old news. But
that's what made Motorola's success. So he came in and instead of taking advantage of the
wonderful innovations and technology that was in place at Fairchild, instead he seemed to want
to make them over in Motorola's image. And as I said, I was a brash young man and I couldn't
help but tell him why I thought a lot of things he was doing was wrong, but I guess I should take
the time to tell one story that cost me my job. We went to visit Digital Equipment Corporation, in
those days it was called DEC. Now it's just called Digital. Now its gone, it's part of Compaq; which
is now gone, part of HP. But the founder of Digital had a meeting set up with Les Hogan. And we
went to meet with him. And when we got there I had properly briefed Les Hogan on what we
should say about our proprietary family of Digital building blocks which were TTL building blocks
called MSI, Medium Scale Integration, the 9300. Ken Olson who was the founder of Digital
Equipment was quite a good Engineer and I thought he would be very responsive and receptive
to our pitch on why these were a superior way to assemble a computer. And why they were built
with a system in mind, as opposed to just being random collections of gates. Well, we talked and
Les said to Ken, so what do you want us to do? So Ken said, well you know I've got a problem,
Texas Instruments has their series 54 and there's a lot of sources of that and you're a sole source
on the series 9300. Sure would make my life easier if you'd just agree to build series 5474. And to
my amazement Les Hogan said if that's what you want, that's what we're going to do. Well, what
did that mean? It meant that all of our proprietary development, all of our invention, all of our
innovation, all of our competitive advantage was down the tubes and all we had now was the
opportunity to be an alternate source to TI who was already a giant manufacturer. So after the
meeting, we were outside and I was just really so upset. I'd worked so hard, my people had
worked so hard, all the engineering people had worked so hard to win that design and all we had
to do was to say series 74 is not competitive with our solution. I'm sorry, but this is the way to go
and I know he would have gone. I mean you could tell, he was just shocked that we agreed. So
Les Hogan said, what do you think? And I said I think you just wrecked the company. Wrong thing
to say to the president of a public company, especially when he has just recently taken over.
So I think that's what sort of signed my death warrant with Fairchild, but just to close that story out
and move onto AMD, which is the pride of my life; short of my daughters, of course. One day, I
decided that, which is amazing in retrospect, that I was the best candidate to run the
semiconductor operation. As I had mentioned earlier Fairchild Camera and Instrument of which
Les Hogan was the president, was the parent company, but he was also acting as Vice President
and General Manager of Fairchild Semiconductor, which was really the heart and soul of the
business. But at some point in time it was pretty clear he was going to name somebody to be
president of Fairchild Semiconductor, at least I thought he was. So I said I'd throw my hat in the