Nixies, was Re: Octal

Hijacking the thread for a second, but does anyone have any interesting ideas as to what to do with a few Nixies, other than building the obvious (but none-the-less cool) clock? I scored my first ever Nixies today, nine of them, from some scrap equipment [1] - now it's a case of figuring out what to do with them! There's six NL840s, plus three NL842s (which have a decimal point). They all seem to work, except for one tube where one quarter of the '8' character seems to have given up. [1] They came in "digital moisture computers", where the digital bit just means it has a digital readout and the computer bit just means it has a bit of analogue gubbins in there to calculate moisture from samples - there's nothing too exciting about the electronics! :-) I kept one of the three units purely for the PSU (just in case it has enough guts to drive all 9 Nixies) and then just pulled the tubes + driver boards from the other two. Chip dates suggest 1980, which seems quite late to me - when did LCD displays become widespread in equipment? Must have been about that time? Damn, but they look nice when working - bright orange along the centres of the digits with a faint blue glow around the edges. Far nicer than the Nixie counter that we have at the museum (now someone's going to tell me that's a sign that all the tubes are about to die ;) cheers Jules