28 Feb
2008
28 Feb
'08
8:29 p.m.
On 28 Feb 2008 at 15:26, Jules Richardson wrote:
Does anyone know when seven segment displays first
appeared on the scene?
Presumably the first ones were VF, and LED came later?
(I was just looking at a museum's mock-up of the Apollo mission control
console, and the fake readout is made to look like a 7-seg display; I'm just
surprised that the digital readouts weren't all Nixie-based back then)
Some datapoints:
- early 1900's: patents for segmented numeric displays
- 1963: Friden EC-130 calculator uses 7-seg vector-scan CRT display
- mid-1960's: Apollo Guidance Computer electroluminescent 7-seg displays
The earliest *off-the-shelf* 7-segment display modules that I've run across are
from ca. 1967:
http://www3.telus.net/~bhilpert/tmp/dialco7seg/
As can be seen, they use neon bulbs. The displays themselves are not dated but
other component date codes in the instrument they came out of were in the range
66xx-67xx. The large-format 7-seg LED modules that came out 10-15 years later
look pretty much like copies of these.
Earliest I know of for 7-seg VF and single-envelope-incandescent (RCA numitron
and similar) would be very late 60's, for LED's very early 70's.
(NIXIEs were mid- or late- 50's.)