kinda sorta maybe OT: Nixie tube display wristwatch

[Tom Jennings]

On Mon, 7 Feb 2005, Scott Stevens wrote:

>> I have the prototype. Maximum nerd cool. High voltage!
>> Microprocessors!  50-year-old display tech! Wearable!
>>
>> http://www.nixiewatch.com
>
> It's cool and all, but the article says the Nixie tubes were stripped
> from an H-P DVM.  I'm an old test-gear collector, and I'd hate for this
> kind of thing to kick off a frenzy of people making 'novelty' items by
> destroying old test equipment.
>
> Are there Nixie tubes still in production?  If so, cool and
> all-power-to-it.  If not, let's be cautious in our enthusiasm.  This is
> a 'core-plane wall-hanging' type thing for some of us.

Don't get all in a twist about the poor HP counters... You read
the story I assume; that's the playing-with model from a junked
counter. The tubes aren't made any more, but there exist semi-vast
quantities of NOS, which is what David makes everything from. With
a few exceptions, stated on the website, none of the parts are
previously used.  The CRTs for the CRT clocks he orders from the
manufacturer.

This is top-notch quality, design and production, not hobbiest
one-off custom stuff, like I make sometimes. Nothing wrong with
that, but this is actual manufacture on a small scale. Nearly no
one makes stuff of this quality.