Some very old, expensive, and interesting computer items on ebay.

Funny that all the other C4040 engineering samples are in white packages, not brown, and do not have a 1975 date code. How would an Intel sample get to China to begin with?

doesn't look much like this one does it?

here is another nice little collection of pictures:

just found a whole bunch of them which may throw a different light on the subject.

So here's how it would go: Buyer pays $800K for chip. Buyer gets chip but doesn't dare power it (that's a whole different issue). How does the buyer know the chip is genuine? Is it worth more if it works?

Now consider powering it:

Will powering it destroy it? If buyer does power it and it tests bad, should he open it to find out if he was fleeced (risking devaluing it), just ask for his money back, or just sell it to the next sucker perpetuating the sucker train.

I just don't see how one can see buying "collectible" micros a good thing.

JJS

Wouldn't the 4004 be even more valuable?

I should hope so, but at $800K for a 4040, I figure it is about $799.9K over priced.

-- Don McKenzie

Web's best price on Olinuxino Linux PC:

The World's Cheapest Computer: DuinoMite the PIC32 $23 Basic Computer-MicroController

So, you'd pay $100 to get one ??

Yay!

I am having a hard time convincing my wife that we need to be patient and wait, until my garage-full-of-junk becomes Alibaba's treasure cave.

-- Roberto Waltman

If it came with a certificate of authenticity.......how easy would it be to clone a 4040 these days?

That's all part of the balance of nature. In order for my baseball card collection to become valuable, everybody else's mom had to throw theirs away while they were at summer camp.

(Do they have cricket cards in OZ?)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Lucky I've still got my Beta machines.

Your "Chinese" is a common sidebraze used "in-house." Maybe the other packages were for engineering samples that went to outside vendors.

The free shipping makes this deal so tempting. Wait, that price isn't in rupees?

No, the buyer must not do anything that might reveal the item to be a fake. As long as the buyer has no grounds for such a belief, he can let the thing appreciate some more, and then sell it at a profit. The moment he knows it's a dud, his investment is lost.

Sylvia.

Schrodinger's chip?

priced.

I agree. Does make me wonder what the two 4004's I gave away a couple years ago are worth

w..

priced.

According to this article, they were worth $212-$550 each in 2005, on eBay.

Less than 25 cents/transistor, vs less than 1.5E-5 cents/transistor on a Gulftown i7 (about 2 million times more expensive).

Geez! Shouldn't have thrown out all that old crap years ago! I had an 8008 CPU, and probably some other vintage stuff. Hmmm, wait, I think I still HAVE an 8008 and matching EPROMS, etc. in an old prototype I made.

Jon