[Leica] Nixies

[jhnichols at lighttube.net (Jim Nichols)]

Larry,

I can recall wind tunnel instrumentation displays of the late 50-early 60 
era that consisted of Nixies.  They sure were more easily read than pressure 
gauges.  However, being on the user side, rather than the provider, I was 
never familiar with the details of the driving process.

Jim Nichols
Tullahoma, TN USA
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Lawrence Zeitlin" <lrzeitlin at gmail.com>
To: "Leica LUG" <lug at leica-users.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 10, 2010 7:20 PM
Subject: Re: [Leica] Nixies


> Rei,
>
> Indeed you are right. I'm always amused when bad guys in movies trigger 
> off
> a state of the art nuclear device and the time to detonation is shown on
> Nixie tubes, a half century old technology. But for those unfamiliar with
> the Nixies, digits from 1 thru 0  are shown as brightly illuminated 
> figures,
> very easy to read. But Nixie tubes don't count by themselves. They require 
> a
> decimal driver tube. These tubes had 10 cathodes and an electron beam was
> switched from one to the next by a single pulse. According to the 
> engineers
> at Burroughs, a decimal computer using these tubes was very easy to 
> design.
> It was an electronic analog of a mechanical calculator with the gears
> replaced by Nixies and their decimal drivers. Unfortunately it was VERY 
> slow
> compared to the newfangled (1950s era) transistor binary computers. But 
> even
> more archaic than the Nixie display was the method of programming. The
> instruction input consisted of a number of pegboards, looking like 
> cribbage
> boards, strung together in a chain. Small pins inserted into the boards
> activated micro switches as the chain of boards was drawn through the
> computer. It was a mechanical monstrosity but its main virtue was that
> computer illiterates could use the exact same programs that they were
> accustomed to use with Freidan, Marchant, and Monroe mechanical 
> calculators.
> Of course the technical triumph of this era was the introduction of the
> Leica M camera, also, by now, a half century old technology.
>
>
> Larry Z
>
> - - - -
>
>
> aren't nixies for display?
>
>
> when i was in high school, my dad was a Columbia professor and he had
>
> some kind of array processor racked up with his HP1000 minicomputer.
>
> That array processor had nixies and it was a beauty!
>
>
> Anyone who is too young to know what a nixie tube is, here's an product
>
> highlighting these gems:
>
>
> http://www.amazon.com/Nixie-Clock-Factory-Assembled-Tested/dp/B001M1GJPG
>
>
> -rei
>
>
>
> On 08/10/2010 12:06 PM, Lawrence Zeitlin wrote:
>
>
> On a personal note, the first computer that I personally programmed was 
> the
>
> Burroughs 101, a base 10 machine that used 10 step Nixie tubes as a
>
> calculating element. The machine existed during the heyday of 10 digit IBM
>
> cards. While it made interpretation of the results easy for a ten fingered
>
> operator, the machine was soon eclipsed by much faster binary machines. So
>
> it goes.
>
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