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Managers like Sporck had no game plan for globalization. He’d just as happily have kept building factories in Maine or California had they cost the same. But Asia had millions of peasant farmers looking for factory jobs, keeping wages low and guaranteeing they’d stay low for some time. Foreign policy strategists in Washington saw ethnic Chinese workers in cities like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Penang as ripe for Mao Zedong’s Communist subversion. Sporck saw them as a capitalist’s dream. “We had union problems in Silicon Valley,” Sporck noted. “We never had any union problems in the Orient.”

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Some colleagues at Fairchild were apprehensive. “The Red Chinese are down your nose,” one warned, eying the thousands of People’s Liberation Army soldiers stationed on Hong Kong’s northern border. “You’re going to get run over.” But the radio factory Noyce had invested in illustrated the opportunity. “The Chinese labor, the girls working there, were exceeding everything that was ever known,” one of Sporck’s colleagues recalled. Assembly workers in Hong Kong seemed twice as fast as Americans, Fairchild executives thought, and more “willing to tolerate monotonous work,” one executive reported

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Pat Haggerty, the TI Chairman, had asked Jack Kilby to build a handheld, semiconductor-powered calculator in 1967. However, TI’s marketing department didn’t think there’d be a market for a cheap, handheld calculator, so the project stagnated. Japan’s Sharp Electronics disagreed, putting California-produced chips in a calculator that was far simpler and cheaper than anyone had thought possible. Sharp’s success guaranteed most calculators produced in the 1970s were Japanese made. If only TI had found a way to market its own branded devices earlier, Haggerty later lamented,

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Computer History Museum 

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Computer History Museum

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Interdependence wasn’t always easy. In 1959, the Electronics Industries Association appealed to the U.S. government for help lest Japanese imports undermine “national security”—and their own bottom line. But letting Japan build an electronics industry was part of U.S. Cold War strategy, so, during the 1960s, Washington never put much pressure on Tokyo over the issue

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