The eight engineers who left Shockley Semiconductor in 1957 to form Fairchild Semiconductor were called the Traitorous Eight.
The group worked for William Shockley, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who had established Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California. The engineers became frustrated with management and with Shockley’s changing priorities. They sought financial backing from Sherman Fairchild, leading to the creation of Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957.
The group included Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, and Sheldon Roberts. Fairchild became a foundational Silicon Valley company and developed important advances in planar manufacturing and integrated circuits.
The nickname was not the group’s formal company name. It referred to Shockley’s reported view that the engineers had betrayed him. Several members later founded or helped build other influential technology companies, making the episode central to Silicon Valley’s spin-off culture.