It sounds almost comical. "Other than the transistor". The transistor is one of the most important inventions humanity ever made.
because the transistor is so fundamental, we probably could've worked towards it in hundreds of different ways than Bell Labs
but that's a big thing in tech circles - thinking a person or entity doing some technical feat is somehow a sign that they are otherworldly
Consider dual-space methods in crystallography. Herb Hauptman is credited with the discovery. My undergraduate advisor obliquely mentioned that he had done something similar in 1986 - obtain atom positions from direct methods, then do a few cycles of tangent refinement from the highest peaks. It reduces map noise considerably.
Computers were simply too slow at that time to use this as a general method of solving 1000-atom structures, so the approach remained an afterthought. But the possibilities were noted once the computing power was there.
I heard recently about the Scythe Project. Apparently, the scythe was never invented in some places, including India. That's a long time for the lucky guy to never show up.