Artifact Details

Title

Parker, Gerry (Gerhard) H. oral history

Catalog Number

102738137

Type

Moving image

Description

Gerry was born in a small farming town outside of Munich, Germany in 1943. His mother married an American GI in 1950 and they moved to the United States in 1952. They moved around to different parts of the US before being transferred back to Germany, and then finally to Fort Ord in California.
He attended Caltech, which he attended on a scholarship. He ended up staying at Caltech for 8 years and earned a PhD. During his senior year at Caltech, he met Professor Carver Mead who had a major influence on him and his later career. During the summers he worked for a wide variety of companies, including Mobile Oil, Varian, Hewlett Packard, and others.
Upon graduation, he chose to go to work at Intel. His first job focused on fixing reliability issues Intel was having with Schottky diodes. He later headed reliability engineering and then all of QA.
Gerry spent his whole career at Intel moving from QA to eventually heading process development and finally running all manufacturing. One of his major challenges was meeting the threat of Japanese manufacturing in the 1980’s and helping Intel to rise to the challenge. He played a fundamental role in building Intel into a manufacturing behemoth and dominant US semiconductor supplier.
Upon retirement, he served on the boards of several companies including Applied Materials and Lattice Semiconductor.

Date

2016-05-11

Participants

Brock, David C., Interviewer
Dennis, Eric, videographer
Parker, Gerry (Gerhard) H., interviewee

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Mountain View, CA

Format

MOV

Category

Oral history

Collection Title

CHM oral history collection

Credit

Computer History Museum

Lot Number

X7796.2016