Mr. Blank and his partners — who included Robert N. Noyce and Gordon E. Moore, the future founders of the Intel Corporation — began their venture as scientist-entrepreneurs in the wake of a mutiny of sorts against their common previous employer, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist William B. Shockley.

Dr. Shockley, who became a lightning rod for racial tensions years later when he advocated a form of race-based genetic engineering known as eugenics, had recruited the eight scientists from around the country in 1956 to work in his own semiconductor lab in nearby Mountain View, Calif.

The group left en masse the next year because of what its members described as Dr. Shockley’s authoritarian management style and their differences with him over his scientific approach. Dr. Shockley called it a betrayal.

Fairchild’s founders came to be branded in the lore of Silicon Valley as the “Traitorous Eight.” How that happened remains something of a mystery.

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“We never could track it down,” said Mr. Brock, the author of the company’s history. But the epithet, wherever it came from, was attached to their names in almost every news account of the company’s success for years afterward.

Mr. Blank, in an interview with The San Jose Mercury News this year, said they had never betrayed Dr. Shockley. But, with an engineer’s bent for the realistic, he added, “Once it got into print, it’s hard to erase.”

Julius Blank was born in Manhattan on June 2, 1925, the youngest of three children of Charles and Gussie Blank, Jewish immigrants from Russia and Austria, respectively. They lived on the Lower East Side. His father made luggage and musical instrument cases, and worked on the side as a Russian translator.

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Mr. Blank graduated from Erasmus Hall High School, and served in the Army in World War II. He graduated from City College with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1950.

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In 1952 he joined the engineering group at AT&T’s Western Electric plant in Kearney, N.J., where he helped develop machinery for making the first circuitry used by callers to dial long distance without an operator. He met Mr. Kleiner at the Kearney plant. The two left together in 1956 for Dr. Shockley’s lab.

Mr. Blank is survived by two sons, Jeffrey and David, and two grandsons. His wife, Ethel, died in 2008.

When he left Fairchild in 1969 — he was the last of the eight founding partners to depart — Mr. Blank became an investor and consultant to start-up companies and helped found the technology firm Xicor, which was sold in 2004 for $529 million to Intersil.

His former partners, in addition to founding Intel, had started Advanced Micro Devices and National Semiconductor. Mr. Kleiner had founded a venture capital firm that became an early investor in hundreds of technology companies, including Amazon.com, Google and AOL. Still, the greatest pleasure of his working life, Mr. Blank said in a 2008 interview for the archives of the Computer History Museum, a project in Silicon Valley, came with the uncertainty and camaraderie of “the early years, building something from nothing.”

Mr. Blank described a moment in the first days of Fairchild, just before production began in its factory built from nothing, when the ducts and plumbing and air-conditioning were set, and the new crystal growers and one-of-a-kind chip making machines were ready to be installed.

“I remember the day we finally got the floor tile laid,” he said. “And that night, Noyce and the rest of the guys came out and got barefoot and rolled their pants up and were swabbing the floors. I wish I had a picture of that.”