In the 1940s, physicist William Shockley, while working for Bell Laboratories, invented the solid-state transistor, sparking a revolution in electronics. Shockley struck out on his own in 1955 (a year before he would win the Nobel Prize for his work on the transistor) and opened the Shockley Semiconductor Company in Mountain View, California, hiring a staff of promising young graduates from America's leading scientific universities as he set out to change the way companies approached electronics, embracing the slogan ...
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In the 1940s, physicist William Shockley, while working for Bell Laboratories, invented the solid-state transistor, sparking a revolution in electronics. Shockley struck out on his own in 1955 (a year before he would win the Nobel Prize for his work on the transistor) and opened the Shockley Semiconductor Company in Mountain View, California, hiring a staff of promising young graduates from America's leading scientific universities as he set out to change the way companies approached electronics, embracing the slogan "Technology for the greater good." Shockley was an innovative thinker, but his management style and treatment of his employees made him few friends at his own firm, and in 1957 eight of his best researchers left en masse to form Fairchild Semiconductor with inventor Sherman Fairchild. Shockley's former protégés would in time create the integrated circuit and the microprocessor, and two of them, Robert Noyce and Gordon E. Moore, went on to found Intel. Filmmaker Paul Crowder offers a look into the birth of Silicon Valley in the documentary The Real Revolutionaries, which tells the true story of "The Fairchild Eight" (or as Shockley called them "The Traitorous Eight") and how their innovations changed the shape of the world during a decade of political upheaval. The Real Revolutionaries was an official selection at the 2010 Cinequest Film Festival. Mark Deming, Rovi
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