Andy Grove, longtime Intel chief and "father of Silicon Valley," dies at 79

Few things in Andy Grove's life were easy, starting at a young age: As a boy in Budapest, he saw his father captured up by Germans during World War II, while he and his mother went into hiding under an assumed name. He became neary deaf at a young age. After that, he lived under Communist rule in Hungary, until finally coming to America in the '50s, where he learned to lip read English in order to pass university courses.

That kind of perseverance would serve him well through the ups and downs of being Intel employee #1 and later president, CEO, and chairman.

In various bits and pieces, we have steered Intel from a start-up to one of the central companies of the information economy, he once remarked, noting how the company successfully — if painfully — reorganized itself from memory chip maker to become the dominant producer of microprocessors, and in doing so helped make personal computers nearly ubiquitous in businesses and homes around the world.

Intel has put up a tribute page for Grove. The cause of death has not yet been publicly released.