31 Aug
2006
31 Aug
'06
8:02 p.m.
On Thursday 31 August 2006 09:57 pm, William Donzelli wrote:
I wouldn't mind getting some nixies to play with at some point, but it's not
a real high priority item on my list. I did have one assembly that I picked
up somewhere a while back, but ended up selling it to a guy who's a real
collector of that sort of stuff.
Do you still have much of that on hand?
Not a big surprise as far as I'm concerned.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin
I don't
remember counting them, but the only ones I saw that would
display alphanumerics were also segmented, as you describe here.
A few years back I bought out the basement of an old Burroughs ECD
guy, and I seem to remember seeing something about hex Nixies. In the
zillions of Nixies I got out of there, none were hex, although there
were many real oddballs in the bunch (Pixies, dual numeral, symbols).
Who knows - perhaps hex Nixies never got out of the lab. But segmented
displays aren't always the best choice. If you have a
display where that last digit is reading "4" and it occasionally bobbles
to 3 or 5, a Nixie will show you this by the relative brightness of those
electrodes, while a 7-segment display will show you "8"...
Seven segment displays are also ergonomic disasters - the military
found it is far easier to read a seven segment display incorrectly
than just about every other method.