The Traitorous Eight
The eight engineers who left Shockley in 1957 and founded Fairchild — the seed of Silicon Valley.
In 1957, eight young engineers quit William Shockley's semiconductor lab in protest at his paranoid management style and founded Fairchild Semiconductor. Shockley called them "the traitorous eight". Among them were Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore.
The move proved decisive. At Fairchild, Jean Hoerni invented the planar process and Noyce the integrated circuit in silicon — the foundation of the entire chip industry. As the eight scattered in turn, they started dozens of companies, the "Fairchildren", including Intel and AMD. Moore's law was formulated in the aftermath. Few resignations have ever shaped an industry this much.