After hours Toolkit

Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American review

8.0

Editors' Rating

Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American

Wendy M Grossman ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 07 Feb 2007

Richard S. Tedlow begins this lengthy (568-page) book by listing the many other biographies of Andy Grove and his company, Intel, that have already been written. Intel's emergence from Fairchild Semiconductor, in particular, has been heavily documented — probably even more than Grove's life. And yet, Tedlow writes, Andy Grove remains a mystery even after all this coverage.

Andras Istvan Gróf's childhood in Hungary left him party deaf due to an early bout of scarlet fever. It also involved surviving the Nazis, Stalinist Russia and anti-Semitism. In October 1956, aged 20, 'Andris' (as he was known) fled the Hungarian anti-communist uprising for the United States, never to return. Grove is for all intents and purposes American, and Tedlow treats him as such after a 50-page summary of Grove's early life. This section of the book ends with Gróf facing yet more anti-Semitism on the ship before arriving, at last, in America — 'the country in which he should have been born', as Tedlow puts it.

In fact, this book is as much a biography of Intel and the PC industry as it is of Grove himself. If Intel is the key to the personal computer industry, then Grove is the key to Intel — you can't study one without the other. Tedlow, therefore, shifts back and forth as needed: lengthy discussions of Intel's relationship with IBM or Microsoft give way to details of Grove's battle with prostate cancer. The latter affected both man and company.

CISC versus RISC, the birth of the 'Intel Inside' marketing campaign, Grove's relationship with Bill Gates, the PowerPC, the Pentium bug that introduced Intel to the Internet — reading these sections of the book is like taking a course on PC history. From this distance, in hindsight, IBM's OS/2 operating system is easily dismissed; but when Grove had to decide whether to back OS/2 or Windows, it was bet-the-company time. A few years from now, the final chapter on the dot-com bust will seem just as quaint.

A minor quibble: in a couple of places you wish Tedlow would indulge less in pop psychology: an example is when he speculates about the causes of Grove's weight problems as a child and young teen. Why, Tedlow wonders, did Grove take such a passive view, in contrast to everything else in his life? Maybe because the Nazis, Stalin, poverty and anti-Seminism were bigger problems? That said, this is a tiny portion of a very long, intimate portrait.

If you're too young to have lived through the birth and development of the personal computer industry, or if you weren't paying attention at the time, then Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American is a treasure-trove of information.