And he did.

Today, on the eve of Intel Corp.'s 30th anniversary, the company Grove built--along with Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce--is a $20 billion semiconductor giant with operations in almost every area of the computer industry, from software development to networking equipment.

Grove could be the single most important individual in the computer industry. And his influence extends beyond the industry into the culture at large. Vanity Fair places him in fifth place on its "New Establishment" list, in the company of people such as Michael Eisner of Disney, Gerald Levin of Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. and, of course, Microsoft Corp.'s Bill Gates. Last year Intel launched a multimedia lab with Creative Artists Agency, a big Hollywood firm, and these days Grove is as likely to find himself among show business people as engineers.

In fact, Grove has lived a life so remarkable it could be made into a movie. He was born András Gróf in Budapest, Hungary, in 1936. He survived Hitler, then Stalin, then fled Hungary on a refugee ship in 1957 after Russian forces crushed the Hungarian Revolution in 1956.

In the United States, Grove lived with an uncle in New York's Bronx area and put himself through college at the City College of New York, where he received a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering. Upon graduation he went immediately to UC-Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. in physics.

Then, having lived at the center of the biggest geopolitical events of the century, Grove found his way to the center of the most important technological innovation of the century.

In 1963, fresh out of Berkeley, Grove went to work at Fairchild Semiconductor with Moore and Noyce. In 1959, when Grove was a junior in college, Noyce had invented the integrated circuit, the device that would change the world. At Fairchild, Grove quickly proved himself in the research lab. He also formed a friendship with Moore that would last a lifetime. In 1968, when Moore told Grove that he and Noyce were leaving to start a new company, Grove asked Moore to take him along.

"I wanted to work for him," Grove says. "I had no idea what the company was going to be." Neither did Noyce and Moore, as it turns out. "Our business plan is down in the Intel museum," Moore says. "It's literally one page, and it says absolutely nothing."

Noyce and Moore called their fledgling company Intel Corp. and launched it with $5 million in funding. Today it is the world's largest semiconductor manufacturer.

Grove, 61, now occupies the role of chairman, having taken the place of Moore, his mentor and friend, who stepped aside last May and became chairman emeritus. Today Grove spends most of his time doing things Moore used to do--that is, thinking about strategy and maintaining relationships with other companies--and he no longer oversees day-to-day operations.

"Grove's major contribution in recent years has been changing Intel's conception of its role in the industry in an unprecedented and invaluable way," says Michael Slater, a principal at MicroDesign Resources, Sebastopol, Calif. "Under his guidance, Intel has shifted from being just a chip supplier to being the technology leader for the PC industry, including not just the processors, but the entire platform definition. This hasn't been without its problems, but overall the PC platform is far better off because of Grove's vision."

Who knew in 1963 how vast the significance of the semiconductor would be? Grove did. He turned down other offers and went to work for Noyce and Moore at Fairchild. And he made sure he stayed with them when they left to form Intel. "I volunteered," he says. "I was never asked."

What could he have known? In those days, Intel was making memory chips. But in 1971 Intel invented the microprocessor. A decade later came the PC, using Intel's chips.

Since then, Intel and Microsoft have dominated the platform, and Grove is at the center of the largest cultural transformation in history--the shift from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.

For Grove, the rewards have been sweet. In addition to his annual salary and bonus of $3 million, last year he made $143 million by selling Intel shares, and he still holds shares worth about $200 million. But for Grove, as for many successful people, the money seems like an afterthought. He is involved with charities, but unlike some of his contemporaries he has the modesty to do it quietly.

Grove's biggest project outside of Intel involves prostate cancer research. In 1994 he learned he had the disease. He conducted exhaustive research and made himself an expert on the subject.

In 1995 he rejected the advice of doctors who recommended surgery to remove his prostate gland and instead chose a risky treatment involving high-dose radiation. The treatment appears to have worked--the cancer remains in remission. Grove continues to do prostate cancer research. He also has made efforts to make men aware of the risks of prostate cancer and the need for regular checkups. In 1996 he wrote a powerful essay about his own experiences that was published in Fortune and later won a National Magazine Award.

Grove is, in fact, an accomplished writer. Over the course of his career he has written four books, the most recent of which, "Only the Paranoid Survive," made him a bit of a media celebrity this year. Grove also publishes articles in academic journals, usually about matters that have sprung from his teachings. For years Grove taught engineering at Berkeley. For the past six years, he has taught in the business school at Stanford University.

His colleagues at Stanford say Grove is a tough teacher, forceful and demanding, which jibes with his personality at work. At Intel he is known as a tough boss--"a drill sergeant," says Gerry Parker, executive vice president at Intel.

By all accounts he was an amazing operations manager during his reign as president. Moore puts it this way: "Andy is focused, organized, a superb manager. He's the world's most organized guy. I'm pretty near the other end of the spectrum. I see things in delicate shades of gray. He sees things in black and white."

But Grove is hardly a narrow thinker. In fact, he has a breadth of mind and a level of intellectual curiosity that make him unique among chief executives, says Robert Burgelman, the business professor with whom Grove co-teaches a course called "Strategy and Action in the Information Processing Industry" at Stanford.

Burgelman says Grove's motivations are not entirely altruistic. By doing case studies and other research, Grove gets to study his own industry. "In that sense this is a tremendous vehicle for keeping abreast of the industry," Burgelman says.

"It's very interesting for me to study the cases and to relate them to whatever issues are on my mind," Grove says. "But really my primary motivation is that I simply enjoy dealing with smart young people, badgering them and letting them badger me."

Working with Burgelman, Grove developed a theory about how companies can survive what he calls "strategic inflection points"--those periods in a company's history when something so big and so bad and so biblical is happening that the company must either transform itself into a different company, or die.

For Intel such a time came in the 1980s, when Japanese companies moved into the chip business that Intel controlled, and Intel had to switch its focus from memory chips to microprocessors--a decision that now looks brilliant.

In recent years Grove has steered Intel through another transformation. Intel has looked beyond microprocessors to technologies that create the need for microprocessors--network equipment, multimedia technology, software applications. Recently, Intel introduced software that lets users more quickly download information from Web pages.

Grove says the idea is simply to keep creating need for the microprocessors that make up the heart of Intel's business. "If we develop high-performance microprocessors and the box architecture doesn't keep up with them, then we are limited. If we develop high-performance microprocessors and we develop a high-performance box architecture but there are no applications that can take advantage of what we are doing, again, our business is limited," he says. "So to a very large extent, everything we undertake somehow touches on this application or market development for microprocessors."

As for the future, Grove claims to be able to see out five years, but that's about it. He says he is concerned sometimes that there aren't enough people at Intel thinking about long-range plans. But at the same time he worries that if you try to think more than five years ahead, you end up making nothing but mistakes.

"The people who are worried about applications that far out, it's not that they go bad, but they go wrong," he says. "Fifteen years from now, I don't know. We can kind of define what microprocessor technology will be able to do in 15 years. But that's it. We have no idea what applications the microprocessor is going to run. And the people who develop the applications have barely any idea of what the microprocessor is going to be. It's too far off."