I joined Fairchild Semiconductor in 1965 as a product manager for a line of modules for military applications. Six weeks into the job, Bob Noyce, one of the founders, and Tom Bay, the vice president of marketing, asked me to join them for a chat. After my presentation, Noyce asked, "Is this a business?" "No," was my answer. I had just moved my young family to Northern California and my job was about to go down the tubes. But Noyce saved the day. "Don't worry, we'll find a place for you," he said. And he did.

I became product manager in the instrumentation division with responsibility for analog modules, curve tracers, digital voltmeters and electronic counters. Ray Stata's upstart Analog Devices would give our module business fits. That upstart is now a $2.4 billion company.

Later I became sales manager for the semiconductor test systems business. In those days, quality was an issue. Another upstart called Teradyne, founded by Alex d'Arbeloff and Nick DeWolf, would make our lives miserable, particularly when they introduced a system with a PDP-8 computer. Our engineering guys tried to convince our customers that they didn't need a computer. But they wanted a computer. Score one for DeWolf and d'Arbeloff. Today, Teradyne is a $ 1.8 billion company.

Back then, Fairchild was a great place. Lots of smart, fun people. Many would go on to start or run companies: Jack Gifford at Maxim, who was also one of the original founders of AMD, along with Jerry Sanders; Charley Sporck, Don Valentine and Bob Widlar at National Semiconductor; Wilf Corrigan and Rob Walker at LSI Logic; Bob Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove at Intel; Mike Markkula at Apple; Marv Rudin and Garth Wilson at Precision Monolithics; Bernie Marren at AMI; Marshall Cox and Bernie at Western Micro. And many more.

But those were different times. Competitors and customers were mostly in North America, engineering jobs were plentiful and for most, going to work was fun, mucho fun. And you could buy a house in Silicon Valley for less than $40,000.

Next year Fairchild will turn 50 and a Silicon Valley celebration is already in the works. What a grand time it will be.