1971 WHITE CERAMIC ?

[oldgoldman]

Am I reading the date code correctly that this is from week 33 of 1971 ? Off an ancient keyboard. Beautiful.

 

[Barren Realms 007]

Yea you are correct. But not a collector chip. By the time you get it off the board it will be trashed.

 

[Oz]

It shouldn’t be that bad to get out if he is careful. It looks like an unsoldered socket chip.

 

[Claudie]

If it were mine, I would cut the board around the chip and let the collector worry about removing it. :|
Nice find!

 

[Barren Realms 007]

If it were mine, I would cut the board around the chip and let the collector worry about removing it. :|
Nice find!

A collector will not buy it like that.

 

[Militoy]

Lots of clues in the photo as to provinance - but I don't see any obvious reason to suspect this would be a highly collectible board. The stamp "CD M2" is probably an inspection stamp - At a guess, I would say manufacturing inspector #2 at a company with the initials "CD", or a step in the inspection process designated "CD". The first pattern was a much more common practice. The chip is marked "RAM 0016" - maybe a 16kB read-only-memory chip in a complex voicing unit of a keyboard or organ(???). This would have been a fairly common use of RAM in an instrument back then. The date code 7133 is pretty clear - but the "GI" logo before the date code provides a good clue as to the mfr of this RAM chip. This board has also been fiddled with or damaged - the top half of the pot core of the transformer is missing - and dust or dirt notwithstanding - the board is inoperative.

 

[Claudie]

If it were mine, I would cut the board around the chip and let the collector worry about removing it. :|
Nice find!

A collector will not buy it like that.

I have seen collectors ask to have them clipped from the PCB this way, but I'm not saying that is the norm. It could be that most want them removed properly.

 

[Anonymous]

It could be that most want them removed properly.

Correct.I've sold thousands of chips(mostly Mil-Spec),and collectors want them removed "properly".A socketed chip could normally be removed without any damage to the chip or legs,however this one has gross oxidation to several of the legs that has cause serious deterioration.It is entirely possible to have some of the legs break off when pulling it out of the socket.Not to mention the flaking of the gold plate on top.
It was made by General instruments( now General Semiconductor).VLSI and General Electric manufactured a lot of there chips,and equipment, back in the day.
But that chip as it sits,would not really be worth any more than the gold value contained.

 

[macfixer01]

It could be that most want them removed properly.

Correct.I've sold thousands of chips(mostly Mil-Spec),and collectors want them removed "properly".A socketed chip could normally be removed without any damage to the chip or legs,however this one has gross oxidation to several of the legs that has cause serious deterioration.It is entirely possible to have some of the legs break off when pulling it out of the socket.Not to mention the flaking of the gold plate on top.
It was made by General instruments( now General Semiconductor).VLSI and General Electric manufactured a lot of there chips,and equipment, back in the day.
But that chip as it sits,would not really be worth any more than the gold value contained.

Maybe I'm just on a different wavelength. I assumed he meant for a computer keyboard (or at that time more likely a dumb terminal or teletype keyboard), not a musical keyboard? I assumed it to be a keyboard encoder chip responsible for scanning the keyswitch matrix to determine what key was pressed and generate an appropriate output code. Which again at that time probably would have been EBCDIC, since ASCII wasn't in much use yet.

macfixer01