Today we are so used to the enormous capabilities of microelectronics that we can hardly imagine what it might have been like in the early sixties and seventies. This lecture will illustrate the environment existing in the early years of the microelectronics revolution, and describe the seminal inventions that produced in less than 10 years the first integrated circuit and the first microprocessor, as experienced by one of the early pioneers, Federico Faggin, the co-inventor of the MOS silicon gate technology and co-inventor of the microprocessor — inventions that changed forever our way of life.