Tag: nixietubes

Posted on by

Ancient Web: Industrial Alchemy Built a Technology Museum Out of the Parts Bin

Industrial Alchemy is what happens when the junk drawer wins and gets a museum.

Visit Industrial Alchemy

The site went online in 2006 and has now crossed the funny threshold where a website about vintage technology is itself vintage technology. It is still being updated.

Its Technology Museum is organized by component type rather than by famous product. That creates categories normal museums rarely bother with: Geissler tubes, Nixie displays, Dekatrons, Numitrons, magic-eye tubes, magnetrons, klystrons, photomultipliers, CRTs, VFDs, early semiconductor devices, calculators, and assorted instrumentation.

The archive is strongest when the hardware is obscure enough that a model number would otherwise lead nowhere.

Components deserve histories too

A computer museum might preserve a complete machine. Industrial Alchemy preserves the things inside machines and the strange devices between categories.

Recent additions have included an early Western Electric point-contact transistor, unusual LED modules, a Sharp PC-1500 pocket computer, obscure Nixie tubes, and an enormous hybrid countermeasures processor used in the U.S. Army’s Cobra helicopter. That last module contains a forest of bond wires and dozens of semiconductor dies inside a hermetic metal package.

The site provides photographs, descriptions, and datasheets when available.

That sounds simple until you need to identify an unlabeled display module pulled from old equipment.

Component history is difficult because parts were designed to disappear into products. When the product dies, the individual tube or IC often becomes an anonymous object in a bin. A hand-built catalog can preserve the visual cues, packaging, manufacturer, and application long after the original sales literature vanishes.

The site also maintains the personality of the older technical web. Its updates discuss Hamvention flea-market booths, weird acquisitions, and the pleasure of finding obsolete hardware that absolutely nobody needed to save.

That is very much CacheRat territory. The 1,967 Ancient Web Domains list was built to locate exactly these deep specialist archives before search reduces them to a forgotten result on page twelve.

There are museums for computers.

Industrial Alchemy remembers the glowing orange thing that made one number appear inside them.

Return to Industrial Alchemy

Posted on by

Ancient Web: Mike’s Digital Clocks Are What Happens When Timekeeping Gets Out of Hand

A clock needs to tell you the time. Mike Harrison’s clock page demonstrates how quickly that requirement can deteriorate into 200-volt Nixie supplies, giant electroluminescent digits, custom PCBs, reed switches, and a display bright enough to light the room at night.

Visit Mike’s Digital Clocks

The page is part of Mike’s Electric Stuff, and it reads like a notebook from decades of electronic tinkering. The oldest clock shown dates to around 1982 and uses ordinary red LEDs with an MM5387 clock chip. From there things get progressively less reasonable.

There is a huge Nixie clock built with East German Z568M tubes, a Burroughs B7971 alphanumeric display, a tiny Nixie car clock built from three stacked PCBs, light-guide filament displays, a 4.5-inch electroluminescent clock, dot-matrix clocks, and commercial countdown displays.

The construction notes are the archive

The value is not just photographs of glowing numbers. Mike documents the actual engineering decisions.

One clock uses a PIC16C84 with cascaded 74HC595 shift registers and high-voltage driver transistors. Another uses 200-volt AC for electroluminescent strips. The tiny car clock has a switch-mode supply generating roughly 200 volts for miniature Nixie tubes. Time-setting buttons are sometimes replaced with magnetic reed switches because visible switches would spoil the case.

There are also wonderfully specific historical details. A giant countdown display was built for the UK iPhone launch. Another Nixie display was made for a Channel 4 television production. One early PCB was etched using a drip tray from Mike’s mother’s refrigerator.

That is the sort of sentence no content strategy meeting ever produces.

For people building clocks now, the page still provides ideas about display technology, packaging, high-voltage drivers, and the visual character of obsolete components. For everybody else, it documents what hobby electronics looked like before every project began with an ESP32 and a GitHub library.

This was pulled from CacheRat’s larger Ancient Web research corpus.

Browse the 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list

The page is still worth visiting just to see how many different ways one person found to display four digits.

Return to Mike’s Digital Clocks