Re: Nixie clocks: possibly an AH clock?

The other reason was that they were just no good at making chips. What
little chip industry they had was centered in E. Germany (the most "high
tech" of the E. Bloc countries) and it was not very good, mostly based on
reverse engineered Western designs that they stole without paying royalties.
One look at the supporting tubes for the nixie clock in the "appreciation of
a different era" thread and you can see that you wouldn't want to have a
plane full of hundreds of tubes (which is what it takes to replay one small
IC unless you couldn't figure out how to do the same thing in solid state.
A jet fighter is not the best place to have fragile glass tubes with
filaments that burn out often. Of course if you think of something like a
computer processor with many thousands of logic gates, it woud take way more
tubes than you could fit or power on a fighter plane - the original tube
driven Eniac filled up several large rooms and sucked a huge amount of
power.



"Fortitudo Dei" <fortitudo_dei@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1138592697.67879@xxxxxxxxxx
>> Understand that many of the nixie tubes come from
>> Russia now.
>
> This is possibly a throw-back to the cold-war era. One reason (so they
> say...) that Russia has kept manufacturing vacuum-tube / valve devices
> (and
> developing smaller and more complex versions for the military) is that
> "tubes" are much less affected by the electromagnetic pulse created by a
> thermo-nuclear explosion compared to solid-state devices. Someone I know
> in
> Hungary who got a brief look at the innards of a Mig-29 said the aircraft
> was full of them.
>
>


.

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