13 Jul
2007
13 Jul
'07
4:48 p.m.
I beg to differ on this. I have a couple of dekatron counters and they
only seem to be good to some 10s of KHz (unless of course, you mean that that
was pretty fast for the time). Interestingly, one of these counters uses two
I don;t know if they ever turned up in computer applications, but there
was a device called a 'Trochotron' that was used in counters and in the
counter stages of DVMs, etc.
It was a hot-cathode high-vacuum device, and was surronded by magnets.
IIRC, there was an electron beam produced in the device which could be
stepped round to one of 10 target electrodes (which could drive a nixie
tube for display)
Being a vacucm device, it didn't depent on the ionisation time of a gas,
and was considerably faster than a Dekatron.
According to an old databook I've looked it, Most dekatrons would go up
to 4kHZ, with a couple of types being faster, about 20kHZ. Trochotrons
wuuld go to over 1MHz
types of dekatrons, the only obvious difference
between them being the colour
of the glow and the part number. The ones in the slower speed decades are the
usual neon glow, in the higher speed decade a purplish glow (xenon?). I presume
Sounds more like Argon, but it would depend on the pressure, I think.
-tony