Circa early 1970s gold-clad 24-pin Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) SN54181J, 9341DM, 7418M 4 bit Arithmetic Logic Chip (ALU). Some top engineers left Fairchild, the company that first developed an ALU chip, and started AMD in 1969. This is one of the very first chips that AMD produced and to military specifications. This chip predates the famous AM2901 and 74181 ALU chips by several years. Very early 4 bit ALUs are among the most sought after chips on the advanced collector’s desirability list. They directly paved the way to microprocessors as the prelude to the Intel 4004, the very first commercially available microprocessor which integrated a 4 bit ALU into its architecture. This chip is not only extremely rare; it is beautiful to look at, since the gold completely sandwiches the white ceramic. Most of the few that were produced were recycled for their gold content, but this example was professionally removed by an engineer from a working circuit board to be preserved as a piece of computing history.
