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What was around or ended more recently than people think?
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this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2024
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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vacuum tubes that display a single digit or character on glowing wires - were commonplace in the 1950s and 60s but were superseded by LEDs.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
There's a mod for Factorio that adds these in for use in our circuit spaghetti
Weren't they superceded by LCDs not LEDs?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.