They met in New
Hampshire in 1957. Her name was Eva; his name was Andras. They were both
European refugees. She was a waitress; he was a busboy. Within the year
they got married, and they are married still.
Andras Grof. is
now called Andrew Grove, and he runs a company called Intel, the world’s
leading manufacturer of microprocessors. The logo ‘Intel Inside’ is recognised
around the world, and everybody understands Grove’s slogan ‘Only the paranoid
survive’. Grove should also get an honourable mention when it comes to
the coining of such terms as ‘Silicon Valley’ and the ‘silicon chip’
Andrew Grove has
never managed to rid himself of his strong Hungarian accent, but neither
he nor Eva talk much about their paranoid lives in Europe in the face
of Nazi and then Soviet invasions. But when Time magazine named Grove
Man of the Year for 1997, the cover story was called ‘A Survivor’s Tale’.
The article referred to Grove’s schoolboy escape from Hungary in 1956,
as well as his bout with. But the article also had in mind Intel’s tough
journey to get where it is today.
Towards
a chip
Soon after Eva and
Andrew married they went to California. He did his Ph.D. at Berkeley,
and chose not to join the grand Bell Labs but went to Fairchild Semiconductors,
an early sixties start-up company. Grove’s senior colleague was a brilliant
man called Gordon Moore.
At the time, one
of the major problems in computing concerned the over-heating of vacuum
tubes. These, indide the computer, held and released electrical charges
with increasing rapidity the faster the machine had to ‘think’. A special
kind of transistor or gate had to be found that had an extremely pure
chemical surface.
Gordon Moore hit
on the idea of using metal oxide and silicon – mos – to create
a ‘mos transistor.’ Grove with two colleagues – Deal and Snow – then discovered
that when the mos transistors – or chips - were cured, some sodium was
introduced which rendered the chips less stable. Making sure that the
chip was free of sodium provided an important step towards the silicon
revolution.
Intel
Eva and Andrew rejoiced.
But there was indifference at Fairchild. Luckily Gordon Moore was disenchanted
too, and Grove was invited to join Moore and another Fairchild colleague
– Bob Noyce – at a new company, Intel. This was in 1968. Moore
was CEO but he groomed Grove to become President in 1979, and CEO in 1987.
In 1994 a tiny flaw
in Intel’s Pentium chip provoked a weekend media attack. By Monday Grove
had authorised $475 million to replace the faulty items, and even despatched
his experts to do home visits. Again the survivor turned disaster into
triumph.
Love
Among the Groves
Eva stood by him
all the way, of course. Indeed she has always been more confident about
the amount of money Intel, and Grove would make. Grove has a legendary
temper, and is tough, but has a cuddly side. His two daughters adore him,
but admit that Grove family life is not for the faint-hearted. Grove has
tended to set his daughters writing tasks during vacations, but there
is also certain wild spontaneity at home: Eva once broke an ankle during
an impromptu dance in the family room.
Eva and Andrew,
grateful for the help they received when they were starving teenagers,
that they intend to leave the vast bulk of their fortune – many hundreds
of millions – to charity. The busboy and the waitress have come a long
way.
Eva could probably
tell they would from that first firm handshake.
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