Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to Nixie tubes! Nixie tubes!

Oh yes, Nixie tubes
Robert — (archived)

It never ends...my first job out of high school was with Systron-Donner, which at the time was a viable competitor to HP and Tektronix in the test equipment market. I calibrated frequency counters with nixies, time bases with nixies, signal generators with nixies, test sequencers with nixies...oh yeah, I know Nixie and her spindly little wire legs.

I should confess an unfair advantage in the technoreminiscence sweepstakes. When I was an early teenager I got on the mailing list of the Defense Property Disposal Service, and I managed to convince my folks to drive me out to the SeaBee base at Port Hueneme every couple of months to scavenge old military electronics periodically put up for auction. The stuff I picked up was amazing, some of it the futuristic gold-plated plumbing and ceramic-packaged semiconductors in vacuum-sealed bags, other stuff went back decades to another technological era. I picked up one of HP's first signal generators from the mid-30s, and a whole pile of other junk you could date from the black "krinkle" finish and the bakelite knobs. Of special pride to the connoisseur of military scavenging, though, is this: I once owned two ARC-5 aircraft transceivers dating back to WWII. Never got them to work, but that wasn't so important as the iconic value to the mind of the acquisitive adolescent collector. My radios might have graced the cockpit of a B29 over the Pacific, or a Mustang over Europe. Ya never know!

So I guess my complaining about how this makes me feel old is a bit disingenuous. It actually tickles the kid in me, and my collection of memories of technology are in a sense just the continuation of the collection I started as a kid.

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