Back again

Apologies for the delay; my Powerbook Ti 500 had its main logic board meet an untimely end because of thermal problems, which took a while to diagnose.

Pictures from trips to Alaska for work (6/12-16), south-central Wisconsin for a steam train excursion (6/23-24), and northwestern Ontario for family vacation and visit (6/29-7/6) are 'in the queue;' to be posted soon, with luck.

That said, here's my standby online translation tool

http://babelfish.altavista.com/

which you'll need for a few of the following links.

Nixie tubes were used extensively in the pre-seven-segment-display years for clocks, indicators, and the like.
Some background on Nixies, and the (experimentally-derived?) order that the 10 elements were stacked in order that the previous' digits afterglow wouldn't smear out the following one

http://www.engr.uconn.edu/cse/Courses/CSE210W/NumberConversion/Nixie.html

A close up picture of a large Nixie:

http://www.hanssummers.com/electronics/clocks/nixie/close.jpg

An enterprising fellow has built an all-tube clock using Nixies, with other tubes for the control logic.

http://www.jogis-roehrenbude.de/Leserbriefe/Bruegmann-Digital-Roehren-Clock/Digital-Roehrenuhr.htm

Another take on the same idea, a site showing a setup to drive an oscilloscope with a pattern for an analog clock face (also in German):
http://www.jogis-roehrenbude.de/Leserbriefe/Scope-Clock/Scope-Clock.htm