Actually, the rarest Amiga ICs of all are
really[/i] weird!
Y'see, in the years before Earth-manufactured ICs existed, personel at the US Army's
Foreign Technology Division "seeded" various artifacts out to certain US Industrial combines which had high-level clearances.
One type of artifact was a "thin, two-inch-around matte gray oyster cracker-shaped wafers of a material that looked like plastic but had tiny road maps of wires barely raised/etched along the surface. They were the size of a twenty-five cent piece, but the etchings on the surface were suggestive of squashed insects with their hundred legs spread out at right angles from a flat body. Some were more rounded or elliptical. It was
a circuit -- anyone could figure that out by 1961, especially when it was placed under a magnifying glass -- but from the way these wafers were stacked on each other,
this was circuitry unlike any anyone had ever seen."
In that era, there wasn't any suitable high-complexity circuits to test THESE with!
In the mid-eighties that all changed! High-clearance Personel observed the Lorraine protype at the 1994 Winter CES and saw that here was a design that might be able to do justice to their requirements.
So they approached Commodore and various software & hardware engineers were sworne-in.
From then, up until the last of the Kickstart 1.2 units left assembly, various batches had disguised outsider ICs installed. THESE can be identified if they are prised from their sockets and turned over. An elliptical matte gray oyster is discernable inside the rectangular over-shell.
The US Army had packaged units, which included these cammoflarged ICs, delivered to their labs where 1 unit in 10 underwent evaluation-testing. After being tested, each unit was re-sealed in its Commodore packageing. Test results indicated that these SPECIAL ICs were approximately 15-18 years in advance of ordinary 1985 designs! Documents were issued that THESE Test Amigas were to be locked-away until early in the Twenty-First Century, when the computers in which they were mounted would be obsolete, and unlikely to be held in any regard by members of the public-at-large!
HEY RED!
They're NOT here! :-D
