Brilliant and awkward Nobel prize winner William Shockley was instrumental in developing transistors, writes Karlin Lillington in Mountain View, California

Fifty years ago last month a new business, destined to change the world, opened in an unprepossessing former fruit packing shed on San Antonio Road in Mountain View, California.

Ironically, most people have never heard of it. You need to be a real devotee of the history of computing and electronics to recognise the name of the company - Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory - and that of its founder, the brilliant, mercurial Nobel prizewinner William Shockley (who shared the prize for the creation of the transistor with two other Bell Labs researchers).

Shockley's great insight while at Bell Labs on the US east coast was to realise that vacuum tubes - unreliable and costly "valves" used for controlling the flow of electrons - could be replaced by crystals in electronic devices like telephones and radios. Theoretically, that is.

Making this a reality involved intense effort but the end result - the cheap and reliable transistor - would enable the birth not only of modern electronics but of the age of computing.

In deciding to set up his lab in Mountain View, just north of San Jose, rather than remain on the east coast, Shockley was to alter the region forever.

As Intel co-founder and former Shockley employee Gordon Moore has said: "It was Shockley who brought the silicon to Silicon Valley."

His legacy is clear despite the fact that Shockley Semiconductor Lab never made a profit, closed down after a few short years and never actually created a commercial semiconductor.

As four of the pioneers who worked at the lab told a packed audience at Mountain View's Computer History Museum this week, without Shockley - as infuriating, argumentative and flawed as he was, especially in his later years as a Stanford professor, when he touted openly racist views on genetics and intelligence - his ultimate effect on the region and its economy was as seismic as the Silicon Valley area itself.

As one of those pioneers, engineer and publisher Jay Last, noted, the region would likely have taken a leading role in electronics and software, if only because Stanford University and its stellar roster of scientists, technologists, thinkers and researchers was anchored in the heart of the valley.

But its most distinguishing feature as the world's centre for the initial development and manufacture of semiconductors and as a research and development centre for the whole industry depended on Shockley and his vision for the possibility of silicon.

"The valley is called Silicon Valley. It's not called Software Valley," Last says pointedly.

Last, who joined former colleagues Jim Gibbons (now a Stanford dean), physicist Hans Quiesser (who became a founding director of Stuttgart's Max Planck Institute) and chemist Harry Sello (now a consultant), was one of the group of eight (along with Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce) who left Shockley Labs to form the pivotal Fairchild Semiconductor.

More people are probably familiar with Fairchild than Shockley Labs, as it would yield many "Fairchildren" spin-offs - most famously Intel.

The focus of the evening's discussion and question session from the audience settled on two aspects of Shockley Labs and its legacy - the man himself and the rupture that would see him lose half of his hand-picked team within two years of establishing his Lab, a personal and professional blow which all participants said he never fully recovered from. Last, for example, noted that Shockley never spoke to him again before his death in 1989.

Last met Shockley just as the former finished his PhD at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

"I was immediately struck by what a bright mind he had. Some of the ideas I'd been struggling with, he understood right away and gave me some helpful suggestions," he says.

Sello, who got a call out of the blue from Shockley asking him to join his new lab, said: "I found Shockley inspirational, brilliant, capable of defining the definitive experiment."

All four of the men recalled being put to the test on a regular basis. Shockley was known for asking them extremely difficult questions to challenge their intelligence. Nonetheless, as Sello notes: "The attention span wasn't good." Shockley wanted things done immediately and could quickly lose interest in a project.

"What Shockley did for me was to force me to think analytically," says Sello, though he also noted that Shockley wanted instant results and - in a forerunner of the work ethic that would soon permeate the valley - expected his team to work all hours and through the night as needed.

Quiesser, who seized the opportunity to work in California, was brought over from Germany by Shockley, whom he recalls as being a genius and extremely impatient. Quiesser was collected from the then very small San Francisco airport by a Swiss employee who told him the lab might go bankrupt any day but, if it did, they could go work for Fairchild.

To much laughter, Quiesser recalls being driven to the converted shed that was the lab, and saying: "This is it? This is the lab of a Nobel prizewinner?"

Gibbons highlighted the difficulty for Shockley of facing a challenge many Valley pioneers have struggled with ever since: "One, to run a top class company and two, to keep his scientific reputation intact."

The lab might be going full blast on practical research and suddenly, Shockley would decide a paper needed to be published and all attention would shift away from the commercial research to getting something published. This slowed work at the Lab severely at times, Gibbons said.

He noted that Shockley was also extremely competitive, which the men felt was the likely reason for the Lab's downfall. Shockley became obsessed with being the first to build a particular type of diode which could be used in telephones, rather than trying to build a working semiconductor that the team saw as its real purpose.

The group of eight, which included Last (Sello joined them later), left Shockley Labs after a year and a half because they were all anxious to proceed with semiconductor work and make a commercial go of making the chips that they rightly believed would revolutionise electronics.

Fairchild became hugely successful as a result of their ability to make a working chip and market it.

"One of the tragedies of Bill Shockley was that be believed if you just did good science, you would have a profitable company, but it was just not true," recalls Quiesser.

After the departure of the group, which Shockley referred to as "the traitorous eight", he assembled a new team and often remarked that they would "get" those who had departed by achieving success. But this eluded the lab, said Sello.

"Shockley changed markedly. There's no doubt that the number of good scientists leaving the group impacted him. I think it was really a sense of desertion that he wasn't understood. And it showed." Gibbon says.

"I think Shockley was devastated when the 'Fairchild Eight' left.

"My interactions with him were very intense. He was very anxious to prove that he could re-establish a group that were just as good - and in my opinion, he did.

"There were lots of times when Shockley would say: 'we're going to beat those guys'."

But it would be Noyce and Moore in particular who would be the winners. They are the names that are synonymous with semiconductors and microchips, probably in part because they were as amiable as they were able - great communicators and good team builders.

But Shockley will forever hold his own quieter place as the original silicon pioneer, especially among the Valley's own.

Despite his mixed reputation, his dedication to science and the inner beauty of silicon and electronics reverberates deeply with others in the field. As Gibbons recalled, "Bill had a sense of what was beautiful and simple and that's what he wanted to work towards. Beautiful and simple, and something only he could make."