Oral History of Gerhard "Gerry" Parker Part 2

Interviewed by David C. Brock on 2016-05-11 in Mountain View, CA X7796.2016 ©Computer History Museum

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.

Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - http://www.computerhistory.org/collec...

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Catalog Number: 102738137
Lot Number: X7796.2016