Title
Cox, Barry oral historyCatalog Number
102738104Type
DocumentDescription
Barry Cox grew up in Kansas City where he became quite an athlete, earning a football scholarship to the Air Force Academy, which he entered in 1960. Although he envisioned himself as a lawyer, admission to the Academy forced him into an engineering track, graduating with a BS. He was then stationed at Hanscom Field near Boston where he spent his four years of service as an electronics officer. While there, he also attended night school and earned a Master’s in business at Boston University.His introduction to semiconductor devices in the Air Force convinced him that was the right field to enter, so he took his first job at Texas Instruments in 1969 as a marketing engineer for digital bipolar devices. He spent a lot of time working with major customers as well as helping define new products. He rose quickly through the ranks and was managing marketing for their bipolar products in 1974.
Deciding that further career growth at TI was going to be slow, he joined Intel in 1974, which was a relatively small, fast-growing semiconductor company at the time. His job at Intel began as memory marketing, but he again rose very quickly and within 3 years was the general manager of operations for the RAM division in Aloha, Oregon.
Shortly after moving to Oregon, he was tapped by Andy Grove to move to Europe to set up that region as a geographic P&L organization. He took a few key people with him and successfully upgraded that region to a more self-sufficient operation.
When the company again reorganized in 1984, he again saw his options narrowing. So at that point, he decided to set out to start his own company. He was recruited to be CEO of a semiconductor equipment company startup called Ateq. Barry served as CEO there until its merger with Etec. He was then recruited to be CEO of a semiconductor company, Weitek, as it attempted a major product turnaround.
Mr. Cox continued this path of becoming CEO or Chairman of a series of several semiconductor companies. Over his six decades in the semiconductor industry, he is most proud of the fact that he has guided five companies through the IPO process, a direct and quantitative measure of successfully creating value with new products.
Date
2016-03-29Contributor
| Braught, David, videographer |
| Cox, Barry, interviewee |
| Katz, Jeff, interviewer |
Publisher
Computer History MuseumPlace of Publication
Mountain View, CAExtent
42 p.Format
PDFCategory
TranscriptionSubject
Intel; Texas Instruments, Inc. (TI); Ateq; 3dfx Interactive; Grove, Andy; QED; WeitekCollection Title
CHM oral history collectionCredit
Computer History MuseumLot Number
X7764.2016
Related Records
| 102738103 | Cox, Barry oral history |