OT sockets for Nixies

This is off-topic in terms of the industry involved, but not too far off in the time period this stuff dates from. I've got some very nice, rather large Burroughs nixies- 7971 types. They're 4.8" high, "British flag" display which looks to be 2.5" high inside the glass. They have 15 segments each-- 14 in the alphanumeric display part of the tube and one sort-of cursor, an underline character with the ends bent downwards. I hear one can dismember D-shell connectors to get some sockets to solder to a pc board to connect to these. But my problem is driving them. Anyone know a good way to drive these, four or six of them in an array? I need 170 volts, 21ma all cathodes, between 4.0 and 6.0ma any individual cathode. I was thinking of a pic at each tube, sort- of a character generator that would take an ascii code and drive the right segments. Some sort of escape code would let you send 16 bits to be interpreted literally, i.e. turn on the literal segments corresponding to the bits set, for more fanciful displays.