Rumor has it that woodelf may have mentioned these words:
>Scott Stevens wrote:
>>It's cool and all, but the article says the Nixie tubes were stripped
>>from an H-P DVM. I'm an old test-gear collector, and I'd hate for this
>>kind of thing to kick off a frenzy of people making 'novelty' items by
>>destroying old test equipment.
>Well in most cases the test equipment is broken or very outdated.
Dude... uh... the stuff *we* collect _is_ 'outdated' -- If that's not a big
part of what makes it fun, we'd all collect Opterons and Pentium 4's!
[[ For the archives: 'outdated' != 'unuseful'. I've taken to using my Model
100's in the kitchen for recording recipes -- much easier than pen and
paper, and more rugged than my Linux laptop... ]]
Besides, quite often 'outdated' == 'almost unbreakable'. *knowing* a piece
of test gear will work when needed means a lot more to most than 'new &
improved' despite the bells & whistles.
>>Are there Nixie tubes still in production? If so, cool and
>>all-power-to-it. If not, let's be cautious in our enthusiasm. This is
>>a 'core-plane wall-hanging' type thing for some of us.
Which, of course, I'm still looking for one to put on my desk at work --
but I'm only looking for something that's not repairable...
I don't want it as a status symbol -- I want it for educational purposes.
My cow-orkers (I'd assume like most of our customers) have no idea what
core even *is*.
>I think Nixe tubes stopped production with the advent of LCD's.
You mean LEDs -- they arrived much sooner, and were much lower power than
Nixies... (albeit not nearly as low-power as LCDs) -- and I would think
they could be made much more inexpensively. Early on, I believe LEDs were
also much less fragile than early LCDs; but that's an assumption.
Like almost everything in this world, production costs make a huge outcome
to the availability of products...
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | Anarchy doesn't scale well. -- Me
zmerch_at_30below.com. |
SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers
Received on Mon Feb 07 2005 - 23:09:18 GMT