We found this description so intriguing, we just had to stop. "Go behind the scenes in the high-tech world of California’s famed Silicon Valley. See what it’s like inside an ultra-clean, highly automated silicon chip factory, and connect with technologies that give us new ways to work, learn, play, and communicate. The Intel Museum is 10,000 square feet of fun, interactive learning for children and adults."

Intel was founded in 1968, by semiconductor pioneers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. Originally called “NM Electronics” — for Noyce and Moore — the company purchased the rights to use the name “Intel,” short for Integrated Electronics, from a company called Intelco. The rest, they say. is history.
For over five decades, Intel’s research and development, advanced silicon chips, and manufacturing have brought together the best of computing, communications, and consumer electronics to enable valuable benefits from technology.

I can't even begin to comprehend all of this but it was fun trying. I was amazed by chips- complex devices that form the brains of every computing device. While chips look flat, they are three-dimensional structures and may include as many as 30 layers of complex circuitry. The Intel® 4004 Chip is kind of the daddy of them all.

We also learned about the Altair 8800, a microcomputer designed in 1974 based on the Intel 8080 CPU. Interest grew quickly after it was sold by mail order through magazine advertisements. The designers hoped to sell a few hundred build-it-yourself kits to hobbyists, and were surprised when they sold thousands in the first month. The Altair also appealed to individuals and businesses that just wanted a computer and purchased the assembled version. The Altair is widely recognized as the spark that ignited the microcomputer revolution as the first commercially successful personal computer


Silicon, the principal ingredient in beach sand, is a natural semiconductor and the most abundant element on Earth except for oxygen. Remember me saying that I can't even begin to comprehend it all? Sand? Wow.

Chips are fabricated in batches of wafers in clean rooms that are thousands of times cleaner than hospital operating rooms.Technicians wear special suits, nicknamed bunny suits, designed to keep contaminants such as lint and hair off the wafers during chip manufacturing. Now, that I can totally understand.
While we barely scratched the surface of Intel and all its amazements, we did thorough enjoy learning its history and we were so impressed by all the company has accomplished. This museum demands more time and thought than we had to give it today. Super fun though.