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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;Conder101, post: 1327117, member: 66&quot;]The first certification service was ANACS founded in 1970 and opened for business in April 1972. I did list the GSA and Paramount/Redfield slabs in the book.&nbsp; The GSA in 1972 did separate the coins by &quot;grade&quot; but only as circulated and uncirculated.&nbsp; Then came the Paramount/Redfields in 1974 did have a finer breakdown in grades (circulated, MS-60, MS-65, MS-65+ and later MS-63 and MS-67) but they did not accept outside submissions and there were no official definitions of what those grades meant.&nbsp; </p><p><br /></p><p>The first companies to accept outside submissions and do grading were INS and ANACS in 1979.&nbsp; They used the grading standards from the Oficial ANAGrading Guide published in 1978.&nbsp; There were only three grades of MS 60, 65, and 70.&nbsp; These were not slabs though, they were Photocertificates.</p><p><br /></p><p>The first US company to put it all together was Accugrade in 1984.&nbsp; Outside submissions, authentication and grading, and the coins were sealed in a hard tamper resistant plastic holder, the slab.&nbsp; These early slabs were photoslabs that contained both the coin and an enlarged photograph of the coin.</p><p><br /></p><p>PCGS came along in Feb 1986 as somewhere around the eighth grading service and the third or fourth company to use slabs.&nbsp; NGC began in Sept of 1987, and ANACS the first certification service and one of the two first grading services did not switch over to slabs until around November of 1989.&nbsp; Who knows, if they had switched to slabs back in 1984 after Accugrade introduced them they might have remained the top Third Party Grading service.&nbsp; The other two major services, ICG&nbsp; and SEGS did not come into existence until 1998.</p><p><br /></p><p>Now all of these relate to US companies.&nbsp; For the most part they were all beat out by a company from South Africa.&nbsp; South African Gold Coin Exchange was grading and slabbing, in hard plastic holders, their own and outside submitters coins in 1975.&nbsp; The slabs were serial numbered and the coins were graded on believe it or not a 105 point grading scale.&nbsp; The only thing this company graded were&nbsp; proof Kruggerands.&nbsp; (As fas I can tell the company started in 1972 but their first holder was a carboard holder with the coin in an attached sealed vinyl pouch.)[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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