I seem to remember that in the 60's, the yeild problems that TI was having with the 74 series was pretty bad. A 20% yield was good, and they had to run several fabs, because it wasn't uncommon for a single fab to loose the magic. The silicon wafers were pretty small then, so there were not a lot of chips on a wafer. I think I remember still reading of yield problems in the mid-70's. There was much more seat of the pants work and tweaking back then.
It took a while for TTL to get cheap enough to use instead of discrete diode-transistor logic for the hobbyist. The first time I got my hands on any 74 series chips was in the early 70's.
Definitely, those Fairchild RTL IC's were much cheaper, and also they could be used in analog circuits. They would have been the first ICs I ever used. The next would have been the Fairchild uA702 Op-amp. 3 power rails and if the inputs went outside the +/-5v common mode range, they would blow. The first ones I got would have cost the equivalent of about $30 in today's money. But it had a 30MHz bandwidth - pretty good for the first common opamp. 0.5mV offset. 2uV/C drift.
Buying these kind of parts in Sydney wasn't hard. George Brown used to be in Kent street, and I was able to get there after school.
Richard