Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Nixie tubes - those vacuum tubes that display a single digit or character on glowing wires - were commonplace in the 1950s and 60s but were superseded by LEDs. They're still made in the Czech Republic, bought mostly by hobbyists to build retro gadgets. I have a few myself that I haven't gotten around to using.
Tangentially related Technology Connections video: The Numitron: An obvious idea that wasn't very bright
Weren't they superceded by LCDs not LEDs? The whole big thing with Nixies was that you could display digits but if one filament burned out (which it relatively quickly did) the whole bulb was bad and even then you had to pump power into them and use these complicated plugs.
Enter LCDs, they take ages to burn in, you can run them off a coin battery for literal years, and they're a dozen times cheaper to make.
Nixie tubes were replaced by the multi-segment LED displays for numbers for many of those use cases where the numerals needed to glow. Think the last four decades of clock radios, TV channel number displays after mechanical channel knobs but before they removed the bezel stuff and put it all on the screen itself, etc.
There's a mod for Factorio that adds these in for use in our circuit spaghetti