These days, Moore logs a lot of hours in the air between Hawaii and Silicon Valley. In the past few years, giving in to pressure from friends, he’s started flying first class, one of his few extravagances. In the Valley, he attends board meetings, gets his mail, pays bills, and meets with foundation grantees and potential grantees. He’s a local celebrity, recognizable enough to generate a buzz when he walks down the street or into a restaurant. In Hawaii, he catches up on his reading and is learning, at age 79, to play golf.
Except, that is, when remote areas of the world beckon, and the fish are biting.
”Venezuela,” Gordon Moore says with a sparkle in his eye. ”That’s next. I’m going to try for bonefish.”
Gordon E. Moore
Current titles: Chairman emeritus, Intel Corp.; cofounder, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation; chairman, Moore Family Foundation
Date of birth: 3 January 1929
Birthplace : San Francisco
Current residences: Mauna Lani, Hawaii; Woodside, Calif.
Family: Wife Betty; children Kenneth and Steven
Education: B.Sc. from University of California, Berkeley, 1950; Ph.D. in chemistry and physics from California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, 1954
Most recent book read:Boom! Voices of the Sixties (2007) by Tom Brokaw
Favorite restaurant: Chef Chu’s, Los Altos, Calif.
Car: 1998 Mercedes-Benz 300SD (diesel)
Major awards: IEEE Medal of Honor ”for pioneering technical roles in integrated-circuit processing, and leadership in the development of MOS memory, the microprocessor computer, and the semiconductor industry”; Presidential Medal of Freedom (2002); National Medal of Technology (1990)
To Probe Further
Gordon E. Moore’s autobiographical essay ”The Accidental Entrepreneur” is available at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/articles/moore/index.html.
For details about Moore’s contributions to the semiconductor industry, see ”Gordon Earle Moore” by Christophe Lécuyer and David C. Brock in the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing , Vol. 28, no. 3, July–September 2006. The Fairchild Chronicles is a three-hour video documentary about Fairchild Semiconductor; for information, see http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/2005/pr-fairchild-030905.html.
