[DougHaber]

As pointed out, 25 years later was in the 80s. I wonder if some of the delay in adoption was due to the relevant patents, which were filed around 1959. Maybe that gave a two decade monopoly to Texas Instruments making it hard for others to adopt or innovate around the technology?

[andars]

TI definitely did not have a monopoly on ICs for those 25 years. Those first patents were on Kilby's process which was essentially abandoned. Fairchild and Intel did a tremendous amount of work getting ICs to be more useful over that timespan (see self-aligned gates).