Robert Noyce Google Doodle arrives on December 12, celebrates Robert Noyce’s life and Silicon Valley’s success.
After Diego Rivera’s Google Doodle last Thursday, Google’s patented Doodle is back on the homepage to celebrate what would have been the 84th birthday of Silicon Valley icon Robert Noyce, one of the founders of Intel Corporation, and one of the talented individuals behind the microchip which fueled PC revolution in California and gave the Silicon Valley its name.
The Doodle is not yet available here in United States, but our writers based in Hong Kong sent this image, saying that the Robert Noyce Google Doodle is now up and running in the Asia-Pacific. It is worth noting Hong Kong is 13 hours ahead of New York City, so the date there is already December 12, the birth date of Robert Noyce.
And to celebrate his birthday, Google tweaked its logo to feature a microchip with the Google branding. Apparently, Google is the company behind the open platform Android, so it looks like the search engine giant has the reason to celebrate the microchip (or CPU), and celebrating Robert Noyce’s birthday is like thanking him too.
According to Mr. Noyce’s Wikipedia entry, he was born and raised in Iowa. At the age of 12, he created his first boy-sized aircraft, and assembled a radio from scratch. He graduated from Grinnell High School in 1945 and entered Grinnell College in the fall of that year. He graduated there with a BA in physics and mathematics and in 1953, he earned his Ph.D. in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
After his graduation, his first job was a research engineer at the Philco Corporation in Pennsylvania and left the company in 1956 and moved to Mountain View, California to work at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. After one year with William Shockley, he co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor corporation.
After 10 years with Fairchild, he and Gordon Moore founded Intel in 1968.
Now let’s talk Mr. Noyce’s his love life. According to his Wiki entry, he married Elizabeth Bottomley in 1953 but they divorced in 1974. Noyce and Bottomley had four children.
After his divorce, Noyce married Ann Schmeltz Bowers, the first Director of Personnel for Intel Corporation and the first Vice President of Human Resources for Apple Inc.
Noyce died from a heart attack at home on June 3, 1990 in Texas.
To honor the memory and Dr. Robert N. Noyce, his family founded Noyce Foundation in 1990 “to support the informal science community to develop work that addresses the gaps that exist in outcomes measurement, research and evaluation, program scale up, leadership development, policy issues, and pathways or pipeline design.”
