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Found this stuck on a shelf in the back of the shop while cleaning today. Seems to work well. Nixies are probably one of the coolest display formats we've come up with.

Not a whole lot of information on the company itself.

Found this stuck on a shelf in the back of the shop while cleaning today. Seems to work well. Nixies are probably one of the coolest display formats we've come up with. Not a whole lot of information on the company itself.

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[–] • 0 pt

Yeah, it's certainly a slow counter, and it's one of those hundreds of small companies that sprang up in the 60s to support the nascent space and computing industries. I've had other devices like this with unknown (today) names with addresses where the roads didn't even exist anymore because everything changed.

I'm really surprised it's still operational, these little guys usually baked themselves to death and killed one of those specialized, not available since 1972 counter-driver chips.

[–] • 1 pt

I don't know what the input requirements for those specific nixie tubes, but Fairchild was making the drivers in the mid 1960s. IIRC, there was TTL, CTL, RTL, etc old old processes, some offered nixie tube

"The CfiL 9960 Decoder/Driver is a monoiithic silicon circuit which accepts 1-2-4-8 binary coded decimal inputs at integrated circuit signal levels and produces ten mutually exclusive outputs which can directly control the ionizing potentials of many gas filled cold cathode indicator tubes. The C/L 9960 is designed specifically for use with the C/iL 9958 Decade Counter or CL 9959 Buffer-Storage, but can be used with other integrated circuit types. Only true values are required as inputs thereby simplifying the connection with counters or other information sources."

https://partsmine.com/integrated-circuits/fairchild-996079-nixie-tube-decimal-decoder-driver-cerdip16-y19058/

EBay offers some other options.

[–] • 0 pt

There was also a 74141 that was more common in later years. I used to sell those by the dozen on eBay.

The Fairchild series sounds familiar. I had another device like this one, and one of the chips in a digit line was dead. It was some Fairchild device that I'd never heard of and couldn't find. As it wasn't a very memorable device, I just tossed it after removing the tubes.