This one is pretty close to home for me. My grandfather, Victor Grinich, was one of the founding members of Fairchild. When I was growing up, I remember hearin

This one is pretty close to home for me. My grandfather, Victor Grinich, was one of the founding members of Fairchild. When I was growing up, I remember hearing about how he was one of the "Traitorous Eight" who broke away from Shockly and started Fairchild. Among the founders, which included physicists and chemists, Vic was the only electrical engineer. It was only after he passed away that I learned from Gordon Moore that he was primarily responsible for choosing the first family of integrated circuits that Fairchild made. He was such a humble man, even though his work with a handful of others essentially created Silicon Valley.I still have a few of those first chips and diodes in my desk drawer as a reminder of his humility and brilliance. I'm a physics & EE/CS major at MIT, and sometimes I feel like this stuff is in my blood.