I haven't seen these dice you're talking about sota, but from interviews I've read with EGG and RJK, they sound like the earliest polyhedrons available from TSR.

Scott---perhaps we should think about including dice info on the site, at least for the earliest of the sets???

How can simple plastic dice evoke such fond memories?!?

d4 yellow
d6 orange
d8 green
d12 blue
d20 white

Notice that there are none of the bogus d10, d30, d100 here.  Good honest and mathematically correct polyhedrons.

Percentile (2d20) were also available separately I think.  One white one pink.

I love these dice.  Low impact plastic.  Fragments would get chipped off with use until the d20s were almost spherical.  After a year or two, mine had to be rolled inside a box to stop them rolling the length of the table onto the floor.

I always hated "rolling" d4s.  There is never any sense of anticipation with a d4.  You know what you've got straight away.  And it's usually a 1!  At least when rolling the HP for your 1st level MU.

The d20 had 0-9 twice so that you had to use 2 colours to distinguish 1-10 from 11-20.  Black and red in my case.  I had two red 6's.  
0's would have been two obvious.   Did anyone colour 2 numbers the same?  Or was it just me?

Cheating?  No!  Just giving fate a helping hand.  And this "lucky" d20 got relegated to d20 reserve as it always seems to come up black anyway.

I have just got my box of dice out.  And It has a little hole on one of the faces which looks like it opens up inside the die.  Must have biased the rolling characteristics.   I think thats called justice.

>>d4 yellow
d6 orange
d8 green
d12 blue
d20 white

I have a sealed pack of these stored somewhere; they came from a 1979 basic set.  Since the OCE printing of the white box was printed through 1979, I wonder if this pack was also inserted with them, or no?  Does anyone know?

They were sold separately. I can actually remember the D&D display at our local hobby shop. All they had was one of those carousel type deals - the kind you see in grocery stores with comics in them. Anyway, I clearly remember the dice (same as we are discussing) being sold as a set in a really thick clear plastic baggie. I don't remember anything but a price sticker - probably a $1.50 (that store was the only supplier of D&D anywhere in that section of metro-Detroit). That would have been late 1978 to early 1979. I bought my white box copy at that store...

I've got a set of the old dice in very good condition.

Needless to say, they are cool.