For me, my first real exposure that I can recall was in 1989, when I started my 2nd real job in industry. The company had a large scale inspection CMM that had a nixie tube display, 3 actually, one for each axis. I was far more fascinated with the display than the instrument itself. Later I learned they had scrapped the machine, and of course I kicked myself for not getting to those display units!
I do recall seeing individual nixie tubes in packages at the local Radio Shack as a kid in the 60's & 70's -- at the time I could not imagine of what use they would be. It's interesting how many of us seem to share in interest in old radios. I frequent rec.antiques.radio+phono, although there isn't a lot of activity over there these days. I have hundreds of radios in my collection. Years back I decided I needed to collect every known example of the 70's Zenith solid state "Circle of Sound" table radios. Soon I had them all and duplicates of many. There was a version that had a film strip style clock which was notoriously failure prone -- in fact they were all pulled from store shelves by Zenith and refitted with a blank panel where the clock had been, and pasted with a new model number sticker. I had a good working example and one with a bad clock as well. At the time, my buddy Sal, who used to be an active member here in the Yahoo days, egged me on about nixie tube clocks. Eventually he sent me some tubes, and I hand-wired (wire wrap actually) a TTL based clock and installed it into one of the "Circle of Sound" radios, creating the first known example of a nixie tube clock radio. A picture of that clock radio graced the landing page of this forum for some time. The "Circle of Sound" sets are long gone now -- sold off to make room for more vintage tube radios. But since then I've built quite a few nixie clocks, some from kits and some from scratch. A few VFD clocks as well, and a couple dekatron projects too. I'm good with the electronics, but I admit I struggle with the enclosures. So I've taken to using found objects for housings where I can. At 57, I can now see down the road to retirement and a little more leisure time to devote to the orange glow. And radios. And motorcycles. -- 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 [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/9f2544b1-5e62-464d-84f2-3b3985402231%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
