The worlds strangest dekatron

I live in Milwaukee and our last electronics junk shop closed in the 1980's. I can remember a lot of pleasant times spent digging through boxes and trying to identify strange electronic devices. Nowadays ham-fests are your best bet for that sort of thing.

Wow...! That is just too kOoL...

AnubisTTP wrote: Take a look at this crazy thing.

More pictures and video here:

www.decadecounter.com/vta/articleview.php?item=1064

Its a flat dekatron made by Burroughs, and looks like some sort of missing link between dekatrons and self scan bargraphs. The tube is base-24 and practically begging to be made into a clock, but they must be fantastically rare as I have never seen one before now and as far as Google is concerned they do not exist.

It is in fact a Self-Scan display by Burroughs, the (Application Note) Bulletin NO. BG101C, which can be found here: www.brianroth.com/library/apnote-bg101c.pdf . Here you can read about driving it and how it works

Here's the driver chip for the linear bar-graph displays: www.ka-electronics.com/images/pdf/NE580_...Bar_Graph_Driver.pdf . Found it on the same webpage, although I have never found any of those ic's.