Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. - Delaware

Beautiful RARE certificate from Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. printed in 1972. This historic document was printed by United States Bank Note Company and has an Advanced Micro Devices ornate border around it with a vignette of a man in front of a microscope. This item has the printed signature of the Company's Chairman and co founder, Jerry Saunders.


Certificate Vignette

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (abbreviated AMD; NYSE: AMD) is an American manufacturer of integrated circuits based in Sunnyvale, California. The company was founded in 1969 by a group of former executives from Fairchild Semiconductor, including Jerry Sanders, III.

It is the world's second-largest supplier of x86 based processors, the largest supplier of discrete graphics products as a result of the merger with ATI Technologies in 2006, and owns a 37% share of Spansion, a supplier of non-volatile flash memory.

Walter Jeremiah Sanders III (born September 12, 1936), and best known as "Jerry Sanders, III," was a salesman at Fairchild Semiconductor in the 1960s. He was one of the company's best sales people and was famous for style and flair. He then co-founded Advanced Micro Devices and took his trademark style into his position as its CEO.

Jerry Sanders III grew up in the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, raised by his paternal grandparents. He was once attacked and beaten by a street gang that left him so covered with blood that a priest was called in to administer the last rites, but Jerry recovered. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on an academic scholarship from the Pullman railroad car company. He graduated with his bachelor's degree in engineering in 1958, and then went to work for the Douglas Aircraft Company. He eventually moved to Motorola, then to Fairchild Semiconductor.

In 1968 Sherman Fairchild brought a new management team into Fairchild Semiconductor, led by C. Lester Hogan, then vice president of Motorola Semiconductor. The troops from Motorola (Hogan's Heroes) were notoriously conservative, and immediately clashed with Sander's boisterous style. In 1969 a group of Fairchild engineers decided to start a new company, which became Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). They asked Jerry to join them, and he said he would, provided he became the president of the company. Although it caused some dissension within the group, they agreed, and AMD was founded with Sanders as President.

Sanders remained the company's consummate salesperson, always available to come in on the really tough negotiations and close them. He loved visiting the Los Angeles sales office on Wilshire Blvd near Hollywood and staying at the Beverly Hills Hilton. Sanders always wanted to make money — lots of money — but he realized that the key to earning wealth was for everyone else at AMD to make a lot of money too. While growing wealthy, he also lavished wealth generously on all his employees. At the end of the company's first $1 million quarter, Sanders stood by the door of the company and handed a $100 bill to every employee as they left. Every employee at the company got stock options, a huge innovation at the time.

Sanders gave the company a strong sales and marketing orientation, so that it was successful even though it was often a little behind its competitors in technology and manufacturing. He shared the success of the company with the employees, usually coincident with sales-oriented growth targets. One time, as a successful sales goal was met, the company held a drawing among all the employees, and an immigrant production worker in Sunnyvale, California won $1000 a month for 20 years ($240 000).

He drove the company through hard times as well. In 1974, a particularly bad recession almost broke the company, but a brilliant sales deal worked out by Sanders with one of the company's distributors saved the company. Through many difficult recessions he refused to lay off employees, a reaction to the rampant layoffs that had occurred at Fairchild earlier. Instead of cutting employees, he asked them to work Saturdays to get more done and get new products out sooner.

In 1982, he was responsible for a licensing deal with Intel that made AMD a second source to IBM for the Intel Microprocessor series, a deal that eventually made the company the only real competitor to Intel.

Sanders created Advanced Micro Devices; his personality was the company's personality — colorful, brash, perhaps a little too "Hollywood" for some. He is one of the architects of Silicon Valley.

History from Wikipeida and OldCompanyResearch.com.

---

---

About Specimen Certificates

Specimen Certificates are actual certificates that have never been issued. They were usually kept by the printers in their permanent archives as their only example of a particular certificate. Sometimes you will see a hand stamp on the certificate that says "Do not remove from file".

Specimens were also used to show prospective clients different types of certificate designs that were available. Specimen certificates are usually much scarcer than issued certificates. In fact, many times they are the only way to get a certificate for a particular company because the issued certificates were redeemed and destroyed. In a few instances, Specimen certificates were made for a company but were never used because a different design was chosen by the company.

These certificates are normally stamped "Specimen" or they have small holes spelling the word specimen. Most of the time they don't have a serial number, or they have a serial number of 00000. This is an exciting sector of the hobby that has grown in popularity over the past several years.