I made this post to share my story how i found my way to nixie-tubes, and i'm curious how everyone else came to this hobby :)
My way to nixie tubes was a "double accidental". The very first encounter with this type of tubes were around 2001 when i was around ~10-11 years old, along my way to school there was a little local scrapyards, where me and my friends used to go and collect all kind of materials for more and less usefull constructions of electronic. One day we tear apart a old calculator that had "strange looking number tubes" and we took a few of them home, after a few tries to get them on with a lab power supply and the few search request with the internet of that time didn't bring up anything helpful, so the tubes ended up in a storage container, which ended back at the scrap yard again.. I never seen a vacuum or nixie tube again until 2013. At that time i ordered a few GM-Tubes from a bulgarian seller on ebay, he put a few IN-12 as a gift in the package. I instantly remembered my old scrapyard find, and started to reseach these type of tubes just for curiousity. From there on i fell in love with the typical orange glow that instantly remains of "old age" (from my point of lifespan :-) ) and just looks very beautiful. I quickly discovered that there are alot of different types of nixie tubes around, so i started collecting them. I also started to find out more about old electronic technology, and started to collect all kind of vacuum tubes and circuits. About a year in collecting tubes and stuff i noticed that i will run out of space.. so i had to decide to only collect nixie tubes since they don't take up to much space. Today, 5 years later I own around 240 different types of nixies with around 600 tubes total. Im very interested in how you got to the tubes, since there are a lot of people here that have seen encountered nixies when they still were a normal electronic part and not something considered rare or collectible. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/0e0779ca-1764-4907-b325-f71aca47ff8b%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
