This article is part of Texas Monthly’s special fiftieth-anniversary issue. Read about the other icons that have defined Texas since 1973. In the late fifties, computer engineers faced a challenge known as “the tyranny of numbers.” Advanced machines were beginning to require staggering quantities of circuit components such as capacitors, resistors, and transistors. The downfall of this tyranny began on a hot July afternoon in 1958 at Texas Instruments headquarters, in Dallas, when most of the staff were on vacation. Jack Kilby, a recent hire who hadn’t accrued enough time to take any off, scrawled a brainstorm in his notebook: what if the company manufactured an entire circuit out of a single piece of semiconductor material? This method might someday yield smaller and easier-to-build circuits created as a…The post Dallas Was the Birthplace of the Microchip Revolution appeared first on Texas Monthly.