Neon bulb logic elements link?

On Tue, 24 May 2005, der Mouse wrote: As logic elements that's the only thing gas tubes have going for them. A neon bulb will remain infinite resistance (off) until the striking voltage. Once struck, it's a quasi-constant voltage drop depending on the gas and other details. For neon, from flawed memory, strike-over is around 100V, and sustain around 80V. Look in a tube manual for miniatures with part numbers beginning with 0 (zero) for various gas mixtures used as voltage regulators (picture a zener in series with a resistor). 0A2, 0B2, etc. The glow is caused by quantum level changes in the electrons tricked into moving by the high voltage (gives off photons as they drop back down). The glow appears on the negative element where all the donor electrons are leaving the building. You could probably make a coincident-voltage memory from them... but they'd be slow I think, but pretty. Gas tubes are also light sensitive, somewhat. A lot of neon-type lamps contain a tiny bit of radioactive Krypton gas as a source of electrons (what you call beta particles when they are moving slowly) for more predictable strikeover. Like all quantum devices, it's a statistical thing. All sorts of gaseous logical/counting elements were available commercially for about 15 minutes in the late 1940's/early 1950's.