More about the author: Leslie Berlin
Leslie Berlin tells how she came to write about Robert Noyce: “I knew I wanted to write about the history of Silicon Valley and began reading everything I could on the subject. Soon, I noticed that one name – Bob Noyce – kept coming up. “If I wanted to learn about invention, there Noyce was with his seminal work on the integrated circuit, the device at the heart of the electronics revolution. If high-tech entrepreneurship was the topic, Noyce appeared, front and center, founding Intel and Fairchild Semiconductor. The role of government in the formation of Silicon Valley? The work of venture capitalists and angel investors? Again Noyce played prominent roles. And Noyce, a daredevil adventurer, seemed to embody the risk-seeking culture of Silicon Valley. |
 Photo by Aicha Nystrom |
Almost ten years later, the biography is here. Berlin’s training as a historian and her narrative skills honed as a onetime speechwriter for a Fortune 500 CEO enable her to tell Noyce’s story in language “so engagingly narrated,” as one reviewer put it, “that you don't realize how much business and technology you are learning along the way.” Berlin draws on more than 100 interviews and dozens of never-before-seen documents to bring Noyce’s story to life. A Visiting Scholar in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Stanford, Berlin is also Project Historian for the Silicon Valley Archives, a division of the Stanford University Department of Special Collections. In this capacity, she working to find and preserve key papers and artifacts pertaining to the history of Silicon Valley. “Capturing the history of a place that considers self-obsolescence the pinnacle of success is not easy, but it is important,” Berlin says. “In a region so focused on the future, it is essential that we also do not forget the past.” Berlin lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds a Ph.D. in History from Stanford and a B.A. in American Studies from Yale. The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley is her first book. Leslie Berlin’s other work on Bob Noyce includes:
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