Ex-Intel CEO Andy Grove dies at age 79

(AP) — Andy Grove, the former Intel Corp. chief executive whose youth under Nazi occupation and escape from the Iron Curtain inspired an "only the paranoid survive" management philosophy that saved the chip maker from financial ruin in the 1980s, has died.

Grove's bet-the-company gamble — moving Intel from memory chips to microprocessors in the mid-1980s to serve what was still a fledgling PC industry — helped rescue Intel from a financial crisis and set it on course to becoming one of the most profitable and important technology companies of all time.

Grove's leadership of that transition affirmed his status as a key figure in the digital revolution and an icon of business leadership, whose maneuvers have been studied and dissected in management classes around the world.

Yet Grove, known at times as combative and vindictive to those who crossed him, was also pilloried for his role in one of the biggest missteps in Intel's history: the company's intransigence after a major calculating flaw was discovered in 1994 in Intel's flagship Pentium microprocessor, an error that Intel had known about but deemed too insignificant too fix.

In picking Grove as its Man of the Year in 1997, Time magazine called him the "person most responsible for the amazing growth in the power and innovative potential of microchips," the core ingredient of the digital revolution.

Time wrote: "His character traits are emblematic of this amazing century: a paranoia bred from his having been a refugee from the Nazis and then the Communists; an entrepreneurial optimism instilled as an immigrant to a land brimming with freedom and opportunity; and a sharpness tinged with arrogance that comes from being a brilliant mind on the front line of a revolution."