Speaker 1: Get in Touch with Technology was text Stuff from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot Com either everyone, and welcome to Text Stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm Jonathan Stricklan and we're going to conclude our two
Speaker 1: part episode series. I guess it's a series. It's a
Speaker 1: it's a series of two, a series of two on
Speaker 1: fair Child Semiconductor. Alright, So in our previous episode we
Speaker 1: talked about the founding of the company and why it
Speaker 1: was important, the transistor being the big thing and its role. Basically,
Speaker 1: a lot of the stuff that fair Child made was
Speaker 1: they were components that would go into other people's products.
Speaker 1: So it's not necessarily the stuff that you or I
Speaker 1: would buy. Yeah, it's not usually straight to consumer unless
Speaker 1: you happen to be building your own big, fancy computers,
Speaker 1: in which some people were certainly, you know, but for
Speaker 1: most of us, we are buying the stuff that fair
Speaker 1: Child semi conductors would be inside already. But any way,
Speaker 1: let's get back to what they were doing. So we're
Speaker 1: getting into this era now where we're talking about UH
Speaker 1: semiconductor chips that whether they were specific tiny little components
Speaker 1: or they were full microprocessors, we're getting tiny, tiny, tiny
Speaker 1: elements on smaller and smaller scales, and as we made
Speaker 1: smaller components, it meant that it became much more important
Speaker 1: to control the environment within which these components were built. Right,
Speaker 1: So if I am making a chip today, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm talking about creating a chip that has components that
Speaker 1: are on the nano scale there maybe maybe a couple
Speaker 1: of dozen nanometers wide. So if, for example, a speck
Speaker 1: of dust, which is pretty small, get it. Uh, it's
Speaker 1: bad times. Yeah, no, you're ruining an entire possibly multiple microprocessors,
Speaker 1: you know, depending upon where that moat of dust falls.
Speaker 1: Because while a motive dust to us is very very
Speaker 1: tiny compared to the nanoscale, that thing's an enormous asteroid
Speaker 1: heading for Earth that's going to wipe out all life, right,
Speaker 1: I'll technological semiconductor life. You have to get a nano
Speaker 1: sized Bruce Willows to drill a hole and put a
Speaker 1: nano sized nuclear weapon in there to destroy it. Or
Speaker 1: you can build what's called a clean room. So clean
Speaker 1: rooms are you know, they are what they sound like.
Speaker 1: Clean rooms are designed to have as few contaminants as possible.
Speaker 1: Ideally you've got no contaminants in there. You have people
Speaker 1: wearing those crazy suits that like hazmat suits. It's designed
Speaker 1: to cut down on any sort of fibers or dust
Speaker 1: that you could give off, um, including things like dead
Speaker 1: skin cells, which creates a lot of dust people. Uh.
Speaker 1: You also have really advanced filtration systems that filter the air,
Speaker 1: that that circulate the air multiple times within the span
Speaker 1: of an hour and really try to filter out any
Speaker 1: kind of particulates that could cause problems during the manufacturing process.
Speaker 1: And this is part of part of the process of
Speaker 1: manufacturing that fair Child was was instrumental in developing, right,
Speaker 1: because again, their work really meant that the whole industry
Speaker 1: was being pushed forward. You get at this time in
Speaker 1: fair Child's history, we're talking about the mid seventies right now. Uh,
Speaker 1: there were a lot of companies that were in the
Speaker 1: semiconductor business. Now some of them had already kind of
Speaker 1: split directly from fair Child, and a few had crashed
Speaker 1: and burned. You know, we had Motorolas. Semiconductor industry didn't
Speaker 1: last for much longer. Uh. There were being cannibalized by
Speaker 1: fair Child, right. Yeah, there were other companies that also
Speaker 1: worked in semiconductors and then decided that that business was
Speaker 1: not profitable for them, and they got out, but you
Speaker 1: still had big companies like Texas Instruments sent there. He
Speaker 1: had Intel that was was really started. Um fair fair Child. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: I was having a little bit of of rocky times
Speaker 1: around around that period. They had they had lost some
Speaker 1: of their upper management. There had been a bunch of layoffs, right,
Speaker 1: so they were looking to try and maybe strike out
Speaker 1: there and do something really really innovative. And they did
Speaker 1: and it didn't work. It was it was nine and
Speaker 1: the fair Child Video Entertainment System or v e S
Speaker 1: and later called the Channel S it launched. This was
Speaker 1: the first programmable cartridge based video game system, right Yeah,
Speaker 1: Everything that had come before it was essentially a hardwired system,
Speaker 1: meaning that whatever games were on the system, that was it.
Speaker 1: That's all the games you got to play. Because they
Speaker 1: were hardwired. You could not PLoP a cartridge out and
Speaker 1: put something exactly. I had a game of Pong where
Speaker 1: there were eight different versions of Pong. It's all essentially
Speaker 1: the same game, just slightly so slightly different that it
Speaker 1: was almost like I cannot tell what how tennis and
Speaker 1: table tennis are different. Anyway, This was a different approach.
Speaker 1: It was creating the first cartridge based ROMs. Where you
Speaker 1: could have a game on a cartridge and you could
Speaker 1: pull it out and put in a different game and
Speaker 1: have a completely new experience. And it was the first
Speaker 1: one totally predated the Atari. Yeah, so here we go.
Speaker 1: Why isn't it not a Why is it not a
Speaker 1: huge success? Well, they didn't have that much support. They
Speaker 1: only ever made I think twenty six games for the thing,
Speaker 1: and it was probably a little too early. I mean,
Speaker 1: it just it, it came out, came out. It was
Speaker 1: a little half baked, I guess, compared to some of
Speaker 1: the later systems, and so it never got the traction
Speaker 1: that other systems got. By the way, you can still
Speaker 1: find fair Child video entertainment systems on things like Craig's List. Uh,
Speaker 1: there are a few museums that have them. When I
Speaker 1: was at E three this past year and when we're
Speaker 1: recording this, when I was at the three, they had
Speaker 1: a video game um history section of one of the
Speaker 1: show floor part of the show floor, and they had
Speaker 1: a fair Child entertainment system there. Not that I played it.
Speaker 1: I was too busy playing Rampage. But anyway, Uh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was not a big success for fair Child. It
Speaker 1: was one of their rare attempts to create something scifically
Speaker 1: for consumers, not the enterprise, or not for some other manufacturer.
Speaker 1: Moving ahead. In ninety nine, another big year for fair Child.
Speaker 1: That's when an oil field services and electronics company called
Speaker 1: Schlumburger Limited, when I just love that name. Schlumburger came
Speaker 1: in and uh met up with fair Child Camera and
Speaker 1: Instrumentation Company and set up, Hey, this semi connector business
Speaker 1: you've got, you know, the one that's not working so well,
Speaker 1: we'd like to take that off your hands for four million, Yeah,
Speaker 1: between four hundred and four hundred fifty million, depending upon
Speaker 1: which way you read the reports. But yeah, a significant,
Speaker 1: a significant investment. They said, well, we'll buy this for
Speaker 1: around four hundred million dollars in nineteen seventy nine, and
Speaker 1: so they bought the company and hardly anything happened at first,
Speaker 1: Like they bought it and it just kind of, you know,
Speaker 1: kept chugging along, but there wasn't anything. Everyone was hoping
Speaker 1: for something big, yeah, some big change. So some people
Speaker 1: started to call the new company something else besides fair Child.
Speaker 1: Since the parent company was Schlumberger, they called it slumber
Speaker 1: Child because it was snoozing. So the parent company eliminated
Speaker 1: many compensation and benefits packages that fair Child had established
Speaker 1: over the course of its existence, which meant that several
Speaker 1: key employees wound up leaving. Yeah. Yeah, when you tell
Speaker 1: your employees, yeah, you know this bonus program you guys have,
Speaker 1: that's not really what we do, so we're cutting it.
Speaker 1: That does not help employee moral. I know that this
Speaker 1: is ground shaking news here that someone Oh you mean,
Speaker 1: eliminating a program makes people upset. Yeah, well, Schlumberger found
Speaker 1: that out, and they saw more talented people leave the company. Now,
Speaker 1: keep in mind, at this point, by the time Schlumberger
Speaker 1: came in, there were none of the original members of
Speaker 1: the fair Children at fair Child anymore. They had all
Speaker 1: gone off to In fact, Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce
Speaker 1: were two of the last ones to leave, so they
Speaker 1: had all gone off to either work four or found
Speaker 1: their own companies. But even now with the second round,
Speaker 1: like the Hogan's Heroes era, those guys were starting to
Speaker 1: leave to were skipping ahead quite a bit. But this
Speaker 1: is when fair Child introduced something interesting. Now keep in mind,
Speaker 1: even though the company was having trouble, they were still
Speaker 1: introducing new innovative stuff in the world of electronic components,
Speaker 1: and in fact, we haven't touched on a lot of
Speaker 1: them because frankly, you know, it would be like they
Speaker 1: came out with this other transistor and you know it
Speaker 1: would mean nothing to you, right right. I mean basically,
Speaker 1: it's all just like getting more stuff onto smaller chips
Speaker 1: and making it without making it more power hungry. Exactly.
Speaker 1: You just summed it all up, Lauren, that really is
Speaker 1: what it was all about. And in fact, in they
Speaker 1: introduced the fair Child Advanced Sea Moss technology. UH. Sea
Speaker 1: moss stands for a complementary metal ox side semiconductor and
Speaker 1: they the short version of this. The acronym in this
Speaker 1: case is fact F A C T and UH. This
Speaker 1: is something that's used in microprocessors, micro controllers, other digital
Speaker 1: logic circuits. And it was meant to to increase processing
Speaker 1: speed but keeping that power consumption level. And it performed
Speaker 1: really well against other logic approaches and what was becoming
Speaker 1: a very crowded semiconductor market. Now on the executive front,
Speaker 1: Slumberger decided to bring in someone from Texas Instruments. In fact,
Speaker 1: many people from Texas Instruments. In fact, so many people
Speaker 1: from Texas Instruments. Essentially, they were doing the same sort
Speaker 1: of thing at Texas Instruments as what fair Child had
Speaker 1: done to Motorola a few years ago. They brought in
Speaker 1: so many managers and executives that some people in the industry,
Speaker 1: who we've already learned, we're really hilarious calling its slumber
Speaker 1: Child earlier, decided it's no longer slumber Child. Now they're
Speaker 1: calling it Texas Instruments West or t I West. That
Speaker 1: that they had taken so many people that really they
Speaker 1: were just another branch of Texas Instruments at that point.
Speaker 1: And eight six they created the first Sea Moss non
Speaker 1: volatile electrically erasable memory, which sounds really complicated, but it's
Speaker 1: actually a pretty simple concept. It basically just means that
Speaker 1: that the computer's memory can retain information even when the
Speaker 1: power has been shut off. Yeah, that's what non volatile means.
Speaker 1: It means that once and this is really important obviously
Speaker 1: for things like personal computers where you need that read
Speaker 1: only memory to always have that specific information. The way
Speaker 1: you retain that specific information is you create this non
Speaker 1: volatile electrically erasable memory. Now, electrically erasable does mean that
Speaker 1: you can wipe out the memory that's on that particular microprocessor,
Speaker 1: but you do so at a higher voltage than what
Speaker 1: would typically be produced in say a computer. So in
Speaker 1: other words, I can use my computer all the time
Speaker 1: and not worry that the wrong information is going to
Speaker 1: get wiped out. Also, I'm not going to change that
Speaker 1: it's read only. It's designed to be there and stay
Speaker 1: there and keep it stable, so that no matter what
Speaker 1: else I do at my computer, that's going to remain
Speaker 1: the same, unless I were to remove it and subjected
Speaker 1: to higher voltages, in which case I could erase what
Speaker 1: was on there and then program it a new and
Speaker 1: then put it in there, and then it would have
Speaker 1: a new type of read only memory that would work
Speaker 1: or not work despite whether or not there was electricity
Speaker 1: running through my machine. So very important in the development
Speaker 1: of computers obviously, um and so there was a good
Speaker 1: a good development at fair Child. On the management front,
Speaker 1: things were still not working so well. Ah. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: brings us to to seven, which was when um Schlumberger
Speaker 1: tried to sell fair Child, but I think they were
Speaker 1: blocked by the government, right, Yeah. I was trying to
Speaker 1: sell them to a Fujitsu Limited, a Japanese company, and
Speaker 1: the United States government blocked that that that acquisition essentially,
Speaker 1: which can sometimes happen. That's when you hear about these
Speaker 1: really big, big, big corporate deals, how the government can
Speaker 1: get involved in either approve or deny. This was a denial.
Speaker 1: Do you West government said, you know, you do not
Speaker 1: sell fair Child off to a Japanese company. So instead
Speaker 1: they ended up selling it to another American company called
Speaker 1: National Semiconductor Corporation for only a hundred and two million
Speaker 1: dollars um, which estimates have said that Schlumberger invested like
Speaker 1: like one point five billion in the company during the
Speaker 1: short period that it was. That was its owner, right right,
Speaker 1: So Schlumberger bought the company for between four hundred four
Speaker 1: and fifty million, had invested about one point five billion dollars,
Speaker 1: sold it for one and twenty two million, making this
Speaker 1: one of the biggest busts in technology history. You know,
Speaker 1: we've talked about some of the other ones, like some
Speaker 1: deals that seemed like they were good ideas at the
Speaker 1: time and then turned out to be a really bad idea,
Speaker 1: like you know, purchasing MySpace for hundreds of millions of
Speaker 1: dollars only to find out later that Facebook was the learner. Yeah,
Speaker 1: same sort of thing here. Um, you know, Schlumberger bought
Speaker 1: the company and then just really depending upon whom you ask, really,
Speaker 1: it seems like the most people say they just didn't
Speaker 1: know what to do with it. They just didn't know
Speaker 1: how to manage it properly. So it was handed off
Speaker 1: to National Semi Conductor Corporation, which, by the way, was
Speaker 1: founded by lots of different folks, including some people who
Speaker 1: had worked for a fair Child way back in the day.
Speaker 1: So um, yeah, big bad news for Schlumburger. Anyway, National
Speaker 1: Semi Conductor had been founded in nineteen fifty nine. Uh,
Speaker 1: some of them were Some of the founders were employees
Speaker 1: who had worked at semi Conductor division of the Sperry
Speaker 1: Rand Corporation. Now parts of Sperry Rand are part of
Speaker 1: Unicis and some are part of Honeywell. So as I
Speaker 1: say this, you know, these might be company names that
Speaker 1: you've heard in passing. They have a lot of pretty
Speaker 1: tight and contentious relationship with each other because there are
Speaker 1: a lot of talent that have worked at one or
Speaker 1: the other, or sometimes multiple industry considering. Yeah, so anyway,
Speaker 1: some of them were founders from from fair Child, and uh,
Speaker 1: National semi Conductor would eventually be acquired by a different
Speaker 1: company in two thousand eleven. Another one we've already mentioned
Speaker 1: Texas Instruments. Yeah, now, while Texas Instruments acquired National semi Connector,
Speaker 1: they did not acquire fair Child. But after and in
Speaker 1: a minute, yes, in a minute. Uh, And so we're
Speaker 1: gonna jump from eight seven to ninety four. Now, the
Speaker 1: reason why we're making this big jump is that again
Speaker 1: National semi Connector was trying to see if they could
Speaker 1: maybe get Fairchild to become a much more profitable, efficient organization.
Speaker 1: And keeping in mind, fair Child was still producing stuff.
Speaker 1: They just the company itself was kind of in a
Speaker 1: mess um. But in ninety four, fair Child introduced what
Speaker 1: was called the Cross volt l c X Low Voltage
Speaker 1: Logic series, which had over voltage tolerance. Anyway, they also
Speaker 1: created what was called a plug and play i S
Speaker 1: A bus adapter, which is i s A stands for
Speaker 1: Industry Standard architecture. And you might wonder, well, what the
Speaker 1: heck is a bus? If you aren't familiar with electronics
Speaker 1: or computers, you might you know, a bus kind of
Speaker 1: you know, white, is that what you put the computer
Speaker 1: on to take home. Or is it the communications system
Speaker 1: within the computer? Yes? Yeah, a BUS is essentially a
Speaker 1: kind of communication system, and it can be inside a computer.
Speaker 1: It can actually be between computers. But it allows data
Speaker 1: to go from one part of a computer or to another,
Speaker 1: or between one computer and another. So really, bus is
Speaker 1: just this kind of shorthand for saying, this is the
Speaker 1: system that allows data to go from one place to another.
Speaker 1: Now we've gotten into some pretty crazy times over at
Speaker 1: fair Child. We've got National Semiconductor there, uh that has
Speaker 1: ownership of fair Child. But things are about to really
Speaker 1: change for the company. Before we get into that, though,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright,
Speaker 1: So fair Child has been through its share of of drama, right,
Speaker 1: We had just just the founding of fair Child was dramatic.
Speaker 1: Then we had the old era of the fair Children
Speaker 1: moving away when they became disenchanted with the company. You
Speaker 1: had the Hogan's Heroes era, you had Schlumburger coming in,
Speaker 1: you had National Semiconductor in n something else happens right that.
Speaker 1: That's ten years after National semi Conductor came in, fair
Speaker 1: Child Semiconductor was spun off into its own independent company
Speaker 1: based in South Portland, Maine. Yep, that's why the headquarters
Speaker 1: are there. And not keep in mind fair Child was
Speaker 1: originally one of the Silicon Valley UH companies. Now it's
Speaker 1: technically a main company, but it created this South Portland
Speaker 1: UM facility just a few years after they had had
Speaker 1: been founded. And then UH it doesn't get acquired UH
Speaker 1: with National semi Conductor in twenty eleven when Texas Instruments
Speaker 1: by his National semi Conductor. The reason is because it
Speaker 1: had been spun off into its own company. However, many
Speaker 1: of the the assets that fair Child Semiconductor had originally owned,
Speaker 1: like it had fallen under their Child semi Conductor ended
Speaker 1: up going with National semi Conductor. They ended up taking
Speaker 1: many of the production facilities that fair Child had had.
Speaker 1: Fair Child kept a couple, including the one in Maine
Speaker 1: and one in Pennsylvania, as I recall UM. But this
Speaker 1: opened up a new era for fair Child to really
Speaker 1: kind of focus and try and reassert what its corporate
Speaker 1: identity was and to UH try and get a leadership
Speaker 1: role in the industry again. So they started to make
Speaker 1: some pretty bold moves, a lot of acquisitions. In fact,
Speaker 1: one of the first ones that they acquired was Samsung's
Speaker 1: power device division, So this was a division within Samsung itself,
Speaker 1: obviously not a full company. And that's another interesting thing
Speaker 1: just about corporations in general, is that sometimes you don't
Speaker 1: get a full acquisition. They just say, hey, this one
Speaker 1: thing that you do, we want that, can we can
Speaker 1: we get that, which is way more complicated than monopoly.
Speaker 1: So until there comes site like like hostile take over
Speaker 1: the board game, I'm just really not going to understand this.
Speaker 1: And frankly, all of my real estate information comes from
Speaker 1: a monopoly, which probably explains a few things. But but this, this,
Speaker 1: this was a terrific purchase for fair Child because because
Speaker 1: Samsung was was creating components that fair Child was was
Speaker 1: putting into its own components. And so and uh Kirk
Speaker 1: kirk Pond was the president's CEO of fair Child at
Speaker 1: that point, and um, and he said about this purchase,
Speaker 1: everyone else is saying that their systems on a chip company.
Speaker 1: We're not, and we're proud to be a multi market supplier. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that, you know, that was kind of their entire
Speaker 1: strategy at that point, right. Yeah, They also wanted to
Speaker 1: diversify as much as they possibly could and not. They
Speaker 1: didn't want to be so concentrated on one part of
Speaker 1: the industry that if something were to happen, Let's say
Speaker 1: that someone was to come up with a an industry
Speaker 1: changing discovery that would make certain parts of electra obsolete.
Speaker 1: If that's the one thing your company does, you are
Speaker 1: out of luck. So diversification really important. In two thousand,
Speaker 1: fair Child launched the Interface and Logic Group, which was
Speaker 1: a division meant to create hardware for Internet and wireless applications,
Speaker 1: because you know, two thousand, that's that's not quite a
Speaker 1: decade into the Internet era for the general public. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. Of course, research facilities had been playing with
Speaker 1: this stuff for years and going nana nanna, except they
Speaker 1: were typing it and using lots of as key art,
Speaker 1: but the rest of us were largely ignorant of it.
Speaker 1: Well two thousand, of course, now we're getting the part
Speaker 1: where this is really starting to become a phenomenon, and
Speaker 1: fair Child so we can't ignore this. We have to
Speaker 1: make sure we incorporate this, and might we might have
Speaker 1: waited too long in fact, and the company also started
Speaker 1: making more acquisitions. They acquired a company called qt up
Speaker 1: to Electronics. They also acquired Cota micro Circuits, and they
Speaker 1: also acquired the power management division from I Grow Linear
Speaker 1: and uh so this is, you know, another example of
Speaker 1: how they were really trying to be bold and to
Speaker 1: to diversify as much as possible. They launched something called
Speaker 1: the moss FET b g A package. And now I'm
Speaker 1: going to explain what that is. So moss FET stands
Speaker 1: for ms f ET. It stands for metal oxide semiconductor
Speaker 1: field effect transistor, So doesn't that clear it all up?
Speaker 1: And b g A stands for ball grid array. Now,
Speaker 1: what a ball grid array is essentially a different way
Speaker 1: of creating those little interconnection pins that you use to
Speaker 1: plug various electronic components into stuff. Now, the ball grid
Speaker 1: array allowed you to create more of those interconnections to
Speaker 1: create greater throughput. Right, So you're you're increasing the processing
Speaker 1: power of various components by giving more connections between that
Speaker 1: and the other elements that are in whatever you're talking about,
Speaker 1: whether it's you know, a mobile phone or a computer
Speaker 1: or whatever. Right. And and this is one of those, yeah,
Speaker 1: one of those miniaturization uh techniques right that that has
Speaker 1: that that basically has helped make mobile phones possible. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the whole more processing power, less power consumption. That's really
Speaker 1: what we're going at here. So again they're still showing
Speaker 1: that they're very innovative in that space. Now, two thousand
Speaker 1: and five, they introduced a chip that helped reduce while
Speaker 1: it was a signal line reduction for mobile handsets, and
Speaker 1: again it was one of those things that makes mobile
Speaker 1: handsets much more uh, much more powerful, and much more
Speaker 1: useful in the hands of consumers. Uh. It also consumed
Speaker 1: very little power. It was a very small and very
Speaker 1: light chip, which made it ideal for mobile use because
Speaker 1: obviously the bigger and heavier it is, the less likely
Speaker 1: it's going to be a useful component for something where
Speaker 1: you're carrying it around with you all the time. And
Speaker 1: that's also when the fair Child got a new CEO
Speaker 1: who is now the current CEO, Mark Thompson. He becomes CEO,
Speaker 1: and he had previously been executive vice president of Manufacturing
Speaker 1: and Technology uh over at Fairchild, so they had promoted
Speaker 1: him from within. But before that he had also been
Speaker 1: an executive at Tycho Electronics and and also rake him
Speaker 1: Electronics as well. As I want to say it was
Speaker 1: big Bear, but I don't have it in my notes.
Speaker 1: But as I recall, that's also who he was with,
Speaker 1: so he had a long history of working in the
Speaker 1: industry before he even joined Fairchild. But he joined Fairchild
Speaker 1: as an executive and was promoted to the role of
Speaker 1: CEO in two thousand five. Two thousand seven, that's when
Speaker 1: the company celebrated fifty years of being a company. They
Speaker 1: had been founded in nineteen fifty seven, and so there
Speaker 1: was a three day celebration held at the Computer History
Speaker 1: Museum and I think like like two thousand um fair
Speaker 1: Children showed up. Yeah, so people from the very earliest
Speaker 1: days of fair Child ended up showing up at this
Speaker 1: and it was really a celebration of the company. People
Speaker 1: had panels and talked about what it was like in
Speaker 1: those early days. Uh. And we'll talk a little bit
Speaker 1: more about the Computer History Museum, uh, because they have
Speaker 1: a really some cool exhibits, or at least some cool
Speaker 1: archives of stuff that came from fair Child. Now, in
Speaker 1: two thousand eight, CEO Mark Thompson also became the chairman,
Speaker 1: so he's chairman and CEO at that point. But that
Speaker 1: was also the year that the company announced they were
Speaker 1: going to make a twelve percent cut in workforce which
Speaker 1: was around eleven hundred jobs. So not all good news
Speaker 1: for the company and uh. In fact, in two thousand nine,
Speaker 1: fair Child announced plans to close the production facility they
Speaker 1: had in Pennsylvania, which would eliminate a further two hundred jobs.
Speaker 1: But then in two thousand eleven they reversed that decision
Speaker 1: um and began actually hiring instead. Yeah, within the course
Speaker 1: of the couple of years when they had announced it
Speaker 1: and when they were actually planning on shutting it down,
Speaker 1: fortunes had changed a bit for the company and they
Speaker 1: were able to reverse the decision, which came as a
Speaker 1: great relief for that community in Pennsylvania. In two thousand
Speaker 1: and twelve, the Computer History Museum accepted a donation from
Speaker 1: another company. They got a donation and at unred patent
Speaker 1: and laboratory notebooks written by employees of fair Child semi Conductor.
Speaker 1: But the donation didn't come from fair Child semi Conductor.
Speaker 1: Came from Texas Instruments. Yeah. Now you're like, how did
Speaker 1: Texas Instruments get them? Okay, so you remember we mentioned
Speaker 1: National semi Conductor. They had owned fair Child for a while, right,
Speaker 1: and then they spun off fair Child. When even you know,
Speaker 1: National semi Conductors said, we can't do anything with this company,
Speaker 1: We're gonna spin them off. So National semi Conductors spun
Speaker 1: them off, but they kept a lot of stuff, including
Speaker 1: these historic documents, these old archive documents. They were all
Speaker 1: from nine three, right, and they had illustrations, including technical illustrations,
Speaker 1: and some cartoons and stuff in them as well. I've
Speaker 1: seen some pictures of the stuff that was in there.
Speaker 1: It's really the story of the semi conductor industry in
Speaker 1: a way, but told in the actual history of innovation.
Speaker 1: So it's like seeing stuff get invented right in front
Speaker 1: of your eyes if you're reading through these things. It's
Speaker 1: it's been called the the Founding Documents of Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1: Super cool stuff for a particular Okay, yeah, I think
Speaker 1: it's super cool. I also don't get out a lot,
Speaker 1: but anyway, it's it was donated by Texas Instruments, who
Speaker 1: of course that that was the company that had acquired
Speaker 1: National semi Conductor in two thousand eleven, right, and so
Speaker 1: that was a big big move there. Nice But so yeah,
Speaker 1: this this more or less brings us up to today.
Speaker 1: Ish revenue as of twelve was one point four billion,
Speaker 1: for fair Child semi Conductor small shakes, not too not
Speaker 1: too shabby. Um, it's a they're employing about nine thousand
Speaker 1: people right now and again not necessarily um for for
Speaker 1: direct consumer consumption. But but but their products are used
Speaker 1: in in computers and and industry and electronics, cars, medical devices,
Speaker 1: mobile devices, network communication. Uh yeah, I mean it's And
Speaker 1: if you want to know some of the other companies
Speaker 1: that were founded by the fair Children, we talked about
Speaker 1: two of them already. Intel and National Semiconductor were both
Speaker 1: founded at least in part by former fair Children and
Speaker 1: also Advanced micro Devices or a m D. So I'm
Speaker 1: sure many of you have heard that company name as well. Um.
Speaker 1: And one less little interesting note historical note. So, the
Speaker 1: building that first house the fair Child Semiconductor Company back
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty seven was not a garage like like
Speaker 1: HP and an actual building. Yeah, but it is a
Speaker 1: building that has been made California Historical Landmark number one
Speaker 1: thousand in Palo Alto, California, So it is an official
Speaker 1: historical landmark of California. You can go and I'm sure
Speaker 1: I think there's a plaque out front that explains what
Speaker 1: it is. So it's a it's got its place in
Speaker 1: history at least until the next big earthquake, because California
Speaker 1: gets this, right, I've heard about that. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: know anything about that. We just get tornadoes here, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, that's enough. That's okay. Yeah, yeah, we're
Speaker 1: doing fine. Yeah. So anyway, that wraps up our story
Speaker 1: about fair Child. It's really an interesting story, I think,
Speaker 1: mainly because you had so much innovation going on and
Speaker 1: there was still like this sort of political drama going
Speaker 1: on within the company itself, and I have a feeling
Speaker 1: like the engineers were probably caught in the middle there.
Speaker 1: They really wanted to push forward the whole industry and
Speaker 1: create new devices and really discover things. I mean, it
Speaker 1: seemed to me like the joy of just learning how
Speaker 1: to create new things was a big part of what
Speaker 1: made them who they were, But because of the way
Speaker 1: the company was run, it didn't always align with that.
Speaker 1: So you know, we see that from time to time.
Speaker 1: It's pretty interesting stuff. I think if you guys have
Speaker 1: any suggestions for future topics of tech stuff, whether it's
Speaker 1: another tech company or some other type of things that
Speaker 1: maybe you just always wanted to know how electric toothbrushes work.
Speaker 1: Let us know you know. You can write us our
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