Intel, is it on your computer?

Have you ever wondered where parts of your computer came from? Intel was formed in 1968 by founders Bill Noyce and Gordon Moore. This company has for many years supplied computer manufacturers with internal parts. Originally named NM Electronics, the company switched to Intel shortly after its formation.

The first 10 years of Intel's creation proved to be very busy and eventful. Intel's first product produced was the 3101 Schottky bi-polar random access memory along with the first metal oxide semiconductor static RAM or otherwise known as 1101. Silicon chips became very popular at this time, and Intel quickly became one of the leaders in manufacturing this product. Other products that Intel produced at this time were integrated electronics, erasable ROMs, global factories, expanding product lines, high-level language development for microprocessors, becoming part of one of the first PCs produced, "bunny suit", 8080 the microprocessor and develops "bubble memory".

The second decade proved to be just as profitable as the first. Listed on the Fortune 500 list in 1980, Intel became a more powerful company after merging with DEC and Xerox to work on the Ethernet project. Perfect timing where Local Area Networking becomes very popular, leading Intel to a profitable account with IBM. Intel's 286 chip soon found its way into many computer systems. They then improved on current microprocessors, making them preform faster with less power. By the end of the decade, they had already improved 286, renamed it 386, and entered the flash memory market.

By 1990, Intel had been named the world's largest supplier of semiconductors. It was then that Intel came up with their ever famous logo "Intel Inside". Eventually, they produced another version of their processor named 486. This was quickly replaced by another that was five times faster, called the Pentium. Also this was replaced in 1977 with Pentium II. Intel created a software program that enabled system administrators to streamline access to computer network management.

With the 40th anniversary of Moore's law, a law on the number of transistors in a chip must increase every two years, the next decade provided several new products such as Celeron processor, Pentium III and IV, wireless technology, hyper-threading technology, Itanium, Xeon, Centrino, Viiv and Core 2 Duo processors. By 2006, Intel had modernized its entire business with new marketing strategies and a new logo, "Leap Ahead". This new logo summed up Intel's new momentum for the future.

Today, Intel is still strong and has a part in most computer products. Personal computers, laptops, servers, workstations, Macs, and several different processors for desktops and notebooks are just some of the products that have Intel parts.