Ettore Accenti first became interested in electronics when he was at school, starting with transistors and then moving onto all things derived from them: integrated circuits, microprocessors, computers and the digital world.

More than 50 of his articles – written at a young age – have been published in technical journals; in 1969 he published his first book on electronics, “Dal transistor ai circuiti integrati” (“From the Transistor to Integrated Circuits”), which is still in print.

Accenti set up his first electronics company in 1966 while studying engineering at the Politecnico di Milano. In the years after graduating, he worked for companies like Intel, Apple Computers, AMD, HP, IBM, Philips and RCA, and players including Steve Jobs, Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore.