I stumbled across this Nixie tube clock on Ebay (item 180391884212). I'm too young to remember this sort of thing in everyday use but I rather like the look of it. A hundred pounds though? I have had a good read of Wikipedia
I worked (summer jobs) at EMIs research labs during the 70's - they had a couple of 16 Nixie-digit calculators there, which were used for some of the statistical work we had to do. Each one about the size of an inkjet printer. This was the time of the Sinclair Scientific, just for a bit of perspective.
Anyway, between one summer holiday and the next, one of the calculators (cost: about £600, or about 25 weeks pay) died, so they got a couple of HP programmables in for review. these were about £100 each and had so many extra features, and were so much smaller (hand-held) it was amazing. This was my first exposure to how quickly technologies can change and drop in price at the same time.
If you fancy a bit if DIY, have a search on the 'net and you can probably find a circuit to build one. Nixie tubes are often to be found in (very) old test equipment which people can hardly give away at amateur radio rallies these days.
Normal warnings re safety apply but this type of project isn't that complex.
Might be tricky finding such kit these days. But then I've not been to a rally for ages, last ones I went to were degenerating into cheap computer fairs and box shifters. The real kit was disappearing. B-(
Anyway why bother trying to find a bit of 30 to 40 year old kit that may or may not have working nixie tubes when you can buy 'em new. A quick google indicates that Russian made nixie tubes are easy to come by and quite cheap couple of quid each. Kits for nixie tube clocks are also available for not that much.
Nixies are seriously cool[1]. I scavenged nine of them out of three grain-counting machines a few years ago - enough to make a clock[2] at some point, with some spare tubes for when they eventually fail (they're in storage 4000 miles away right now).
What I *really* wanted to do was make a Nixie-based Sudoku game, but finding enough tubes of the same type for that was rather difficult!
[1] Dekatrons are similarly awesome, but even harder to come by :(
[2] Probably based upon the following, if I can find a nice source of suitable neons:
In my first job (60s) we had a mechanical calculator which would add and multiply (but not divide). It was about 7 digits, and would go chungchung for quite a while before producing an answer.
It failed, and we got the rep to demonstrate a replacement which would divide. It went chung chung for much longer for a divide sum, but wventually produced an answer. It was too expensive to buy without going to a full council meeting for approval, so we didn't bother.
At the same time the Maths dept had a computer, in a large air conditioned room. The amateur radio society could wreak havoc with it's operation from some distance.
About 5 years later the Sinclair calculators could be bought on petty cash, and were far more powerful, probably more than the computer.
On Sun, 02 Aug 2009 17:10:51 -0500, Jules had this to say:
They were often used in early frequency counters and timers. I used to have shedloads of them, but sadly ditched them maybe thirty years ago.
We used loads of them in the GPO in the 60s and early 70s for routiners and other things for testing strowger telephone exchanges. Intriguing as they were, I never saved any for experimentation. They needed dedicated mountings and escutcheons so they were a bit of a hassle.
ISTR that some of them were 'duodekatrons' (?) and counted up to twelve for certain purposes, BICBW...
I've come across a digital clock using festoon bulbs arranged as
I've seen Nixie tube clocks on sale in (probably) Habitat in the recent past and also in the kind of shop that has Alessi kitchen thingies and Japanese tin 'robots', IYSWIM.
I can make my own easily enough, but until I find work again, siz tubes at around £30 each is impossible and the large IN-18 tubes are necessary for the clock not to look lost at the far end of the room (only place I could put it really).
later version of mine used visible uniselectors to count time. I cheated and still used silicon to divide 50Hz down to minutes though. The "second tick" is a clicking relay, but doesn't do anything but drive the flashing colon.
If you follow links from the Mike's Electric Stuff site, there used to be an American guy who had cirucit and PCB layouts for a basic Nixie, and was also selling boards that he had commerically batch-made. Save yourself a lot of the boring legwork.
I'm still looking for displays to make another clock: the sort with a number of individual lightbulbs at the back, each with back projection lenses and film onto a plastic screen at the front. Henry's et al had them as surplus in the '70s, but I never managed to get some with my pocket money.
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