These were point-contact transistors.
For the most part, the Mesa process that made mass production of consistent transistors possible was the result of research done at Fairchild.
It is true that there was a lot of work being done by the IBM T.J. Watson Research center on transistor fabrication. And it is true that all of that research got used by IBMs competitors long before IBM. This is, however, pretty much the story of everything that was developed at Watson, from sealed hard disks to RISC. IBM was never good at developing products out of their own research.
But the IBM semiconductor research at the time was not really all that important in the grand scheme of things.
For a lot of applications, this remained the case until the early seventies. For power RF applications, it remained the case until about five years ago.
Yes, but don't forget that the Univac Solid-State computer came out before IBM built anything practical. Univac was using Philco transistors of somewhat doubtful characteristics as I recall.
--scott
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."