The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce, by Tom Wolfe

What this episode covers

It was a meeting of two American masters: Robert Noyce, who, in inventing the integrated computer chip and founding Intel, willed Silicon Valley into being, and Tom Wolfe, who, in holding a magnifying glass over the social and class currents that shape America, rewrote the laws of what it meant to be a journalist. Their resulting Esquire story from 1983, “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce,” remains one of the most revealing and entertaining portraits of early Silicon Valley and the personalities, imagination, and freewheeling moxie that triggered and continue to power the computer revolution. Kara Swisher, who spent two decades covering digital issues for The Wall Street Journal before cofounding the influential technology site Re/code, joins host David Brancaccio to discuss what both Noyce and Wolfe wrought, and how the influence of each—in computers and nonfiction writing, respectively—remains as powerful and mesmerizing as ever.

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