Back in the early 1970s, the cheap ones (~$1) all came with sockets with cutooff wires. For about double the price, you could get the bracket with the HV driver transistors. Clearly, these were used surplus from the NYSE. It seems that they stayed cheap until the Nixie nostalgia hit the hobbyists in the 1990s. I do not remember anyone since the 1970s claiming to have seen one come out of a sealed box. On my tube that got broken, the substrate is a white ceramic, and it looks like there is a flat black coating of some kind. In a brand new tube, I would expect either no shadowing (apply coasting before adding cathode wires) or much more crisply defined shadows. To me, the wide and diffuse shadowing looks like erosion. I think it would be kinda hard to deliberately manufacture in these shadows, and unless they are functional, it would not be worth the effort.
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