It's a great piece but the unqualified attribution of credit for the 'invention' of the microprocessor to Ted Hoff without mention of the team that made it happen - (especially) Federico Faggin, Masatoshi Shima and Stan Mazor - is unfortunate, but seems consistent with Intel's handling of the issue at the time the article was written.
It's a magnificent piece of writing that chronicles a fantastic voyage. How did it come to be?
> In 1983, Esquire commissioned journalist Tom Wolfe to write a piece on Robert Noyce for its anniversary issue, which would profile 50 Americans who had a profound and positive impact on American life during Esquire’s 50 years of existence. The magazine featured other famous writer-subject pairings, a piece by Kurt Vonnegut on Jackson Pollock and another by Norman Mailer on Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. But Wolfe’s “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce” would have a unique legacy. One historian called it “perhaps the most celebrated piece of journalism about Silicon Valley” and maintained more than 30 years after its publication that “it still stands as the most famous description of Intel and its singular corporate culture.”
