Quiz #4
In August 1968, a tiny team began working out of a leased facility at 365 Middlefield Road in Mountain View, California. They were forced to cram into a single shared conference room because the building’s previous tenant, the chemical giant Union Carbide, was still lazily packing its bags to leave.
This tiny startup was led by two legendary scientists and their hyper-disciplined hire (universally celebrated in everyday tech lore as “Employee Number One”), who in strict legal and payroll terms was actually employee number three behind the co-founders. They wanted to build semiconductor memory chips to kill off the slow, hand-wired magnetic cores dominating the tech industry. Their early backer, Arthur Rock, had so much faith in the founders’ reputations that he famously raised the first tranche of their $2.5 million in under two days — with no formal business plan in hand, just a page-and-a-half flyer.
However, the team hit an immediate branding crisis. Their initial instinct was to simply name the enterprise after the surnames of its two iconic co-founders. But during their very first strategy meeting, they noticed a fatal phonetic flaw.
Because of the specific combination of their last names, saying the company name out loud created a terrible homophone. To anyone working in electronics, their corporate identity sounded exactly like an announcement for an increase in unwanted signal interference - the exact type of chaotic, data-ruining disturbance that hardware engineers spend their entire lives trying to eliminate. They quickly abandoned it.
After hiding under the sterile placeholder NM Electronics for a few weeks, they eventually settled on a slick portmanteau. In another twist of irony, they discovered the name was already legally trademarked by a Midwestern hotel chain, forcing the founders to shell out $15,000 just to buy the rights to their own identity.
Question: By working out the phonetic disaster that the founders narrowly avoided, name this computing giant whose first shipped product was actually a tiny 64-bit memory chip.
Pictures of the founders in no particular order.
SPOILER ALERT: ANSWER BELOW
Answer: Intel
Phonetic disaster: Moore Noyce - sounds like “More Noise”