Grove, Andrew Stephen
GROVE, ANDREW STEPHEN
GROVE, ANDREW STEPHEN (Andros Grof ; 1936– ), U.S. engineer, technology executive. Born in Budapest, Hungary, to a middle-class secular family (his father was a dairy man), Grove almost died at four of scarlet fever, but he eventually become a founding father of the personal computer industry. Through foresight and good fortune, the family avoided the fate of many of their fellow Jews by successfully fleeing the Nazis, thanks to young Andris (as he was called) and his mother finding refuge with a Christian family on the outskirts of Budapest. They lived in a dark cellar in which "the sound of artillery was a continuous backdrop," Grove wrote in his memoir, as Russian bombs hit the area. Under the Communist regime that followed World War ii, as his family rebuilt its business, Grove distinguished himself as a student of chemistry and was seemingly destined for a comfortable position in academia or industry, until revolution broke out in 1956 and he found himself in that cellar again. In June 1956 the popular Hungarian uprising was put down at gunpoint. Soviet troops occupied Budapest and randomly began rounding up young people. Grove and 200,000 others escaped to the West. In Swimming Across, his 2001 memoir, Grove re-created a Europe that has since disappeared, exploring the ways in which persecution and struggle helped shape his life. Grove went to the United States in 1957 knowing little English and with only a few dollars in his pocket. He earned a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in 1960 from the City College of New York and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1963. He worked at Fairchild Semiconductor before participating in the founding of the Intel Corporation in 1968. In 1979 he was named president and in 1987, chief executive. Intel's microprocessor chips serve as the silicon "brains" in more than 90 percent of the world's personal computers. In 1987, the year Grove became chief executive, Intel reported profits of $248 million on sales of $1.9 billion. In 1998, the year he stepped down, Intel's profits reached nearly $6.95 billion on sales of $25 billion. Intel's popular Pentium ii computer chip was developed at Intel's plant in Haifa, Israel.
Grove, who has written more than 40 technical papers and holds several patents on semiconductor devices and technology, was elected a fellow of the ieee and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 1994 Grove was elected a fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in the United States and Time magazine named him Man of the Year in 1997. His first book, Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices, published in 1967, has been used at leading universities in the United States. His High Output Management (1983) was translated into 11 languages. One-on-One With Andy Grove was published in 1987 and Only the Paranoid Survive, the blunt credo for which he was known, was issued in 1996.
Under Grove's stewardship, Intel thrived in the face of challenges, including up-and-down cycles in the technology industry, clone chip makers, and rival microprocessor designs. None proved an obstacle to Intel's progressive domination of the computer industry.
[Stewart Kampel (2nd ed.)]