William Shockley Lee Felsenstein
- 1955 - William Shockley founds Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Palo Alto, California
- 1956 - John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley share the Nobel Prize in physics for the transistor
- 1957 - Fairchild Semiconductor is founded
- Kenneth Olsen founds Digital Equipment Corporation
- 1959 - Lee Felsenstein fails in his first attempt to design a computer
- National Semiconductor is founded