So the cool part about this ad is that it’s a riff on a talk given on transistors in 1954. The guy who pioneered and perfected silicon transistors was named Gordon Teal and he was the first person to grow a Germanium junction transistor in 1948, so he was kind of a big deal. At a conference where he was supposed to speak, the speaker before him talked about the limits of Germanium and how Silicon was impossible to use so the advances of the future are doping Germanium.

In his pocket Gordon Teal had some silicon transistors, fresh from the lab, and his talk was about how he made transistors from silicon. Texas instruments was the first to use silicon and this ad was TI taking the piss out of the industry by saying “Hey, you know that impossible thing? We have it ready for you.”