Bernie was working on nuclear fuses for the Polaris missile at AVCO when Bob Noyce called him to work at Fairchild. His first assignment was to train midwest sales engineers on a new product,  which was not disclosed to him at that time.  Astonishingly, he didn’t have “a need to know!”  Bernie then moved from Detroit to Minnesota to become a sales rep, waiting for the new product to become commercially available.  One year later the new product came out- it was the integrated circuit!

[Thanks to Alan Weissberger for the above description.]