Two weird tubes for sale

Here is a picture of an Argus industrial display module that I have, which I think uses a nearly identical display tube.



This thing is ridiculous, there are five stacked PCB's and two of them are covered with vast seas of TO92 package transistors. You can see the gold cans of the touch sense array around the edge... you could practically browse the Internet on this thing if only it were possible to decode the communication protocol. The display has 12x40 characters, each consisting of a 5x7 matrix plus a five pixel cursor line. That's 19,200 segments to keep track of and multiplex, an obscene amount. I think the Argus plasma panels are a tube that falls in the same realm as the Soviet 32x32 plasma arrays... sure it is 'technically' possible to build a controller for one, but the act of routing and soldering thousands of transistors will drive the user into a murderous rage.