While the traitorous eight were busy setting up shop in the Bay Area, a small firm in Dallas purchased a license to build transistors from Bell Labs and began experimenting with them. Called Texas Instruments, the company had been formed in 1930 to build equipment for oil exploration. It had survived the tumultuous economy of the Depression and grown into a small-scale but respectable electronics firm. 221 In 1954, Texas Instruments became the first company to successfully commercialize silicon transistors.
