L298 age?

Other Hardware General Electronics
2

Datasheet Oct 1998...

Mentioned in 1997...
http://www.jameco.com/Jameco/Products/ProdDS/288121-DS02.pdf

Mentioned in 1996...
http://www.seattlerobotics.org/encoder/jun97/classics.html

Datasheet May 1995...

I'm going with 1995.