[Leica] Nixies

[lrzeitlin at gmail.com (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

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.