WEBVTT Kind: captions Language: en 00:00:00.160 --> 00:00:03.034 Ah. The seven-segment display. 00:00:03.034 --> 00:00:10.401 Just make an 8 out of some sticks, and then you can represent the Arabic numerals zero through nine just by taking sticks away! 00:00:10.401 --> 00:00:13.405 You can even make some letters happen if you’re clever about it. 00:00:13.405 --> 00:00:15.287 These things have been around forever: 00:00:15.287 --> 00:00:24.815 the earliest known representation of them is in this 1910 patent where Frank Wood claims to have devised this special monogram arrangement. 00:00:24.815 --> 00:00:28.082 Personally I’m a little skeptical that he was the first to think of this, 00:00:28.082 --> 00:00:36.176 especially since this earlier patent exists where George Mason devised a segmented alphanumeric display which is even more complicated, 00:00:36.176 --> 00:00:39.463 and creepy looking, but that’s not important to this video. 00:00:39.463 --> 00:00:47.043 Going back a century you might find these boxy numbers in price signage or perhaps scoreboards at a sports stadium - 00:00:47.043 --> 00:00:52.046 anywhere a permanent display which needed to show different numbers made sense. 00:00:52.046 --> 00:00:58.723 Usually large so many people could see them, the segments might be lit with light bulbs (as Frank Wood envisioned) 00:00:58.723 --> 00:01:05.880 but they could even be mechanical in nature with differently colored flaps hiding or revealing the individual segments. 00:01:05.880 --> 00:01:09.074 But for many years, they remained pretty obscure. 00:01:09.074 --> 00:01:13.556 The seven segment display wouldn't really start to take off until the digital age. 00:01:13.556 --> 00:01:19.380 And once we got there and they started spreading, our old pals at RCA smelled opportunity 00:01:19.380 --> 00:01:22.206 so they got out the crayons and took a crack at it. 00:01:22.206 --> 00:01:24.594 And these are their handiwork. 00:01:24.594 --> 00:01:28.768 They’re called Numitron tubes, and they are terrible. 00:01:28.768 --> 00:01:33.121 They’re also rare and frustratingly expensive, probably because they didn’t sell very well at all. 00:01:33.121 --> 00:01:35.155 Because they’re bad! 00:01:35.155 --> 00:01:43.834 This is what I can only describe as the crudest possible way to produce a technically functional seven-segment display for digital devices. 00:01:44.319 --> 00:01:48.917 Now you might be able to tell what’s going on in here just by looking at them, 00:01:48.917 --> 00:01:57.040 but before I explain their absurdity I want to go back in time because by doing so, you’ll understand why these briefly made sense. 00:01:57.684 --> 00:01:58.727 Briefly. 00:01:59.000 --> 00:02:01.788 Once upon a time, there were computers. 00:02:01.788 --> 00:02:04.573 At first very large, very expensive computers, 00:02:04.573 --> 00:02:06.730 but we see the potential! 00:02:06.730 --> 00:02:15.800 As computing technology got cheaper and microprocessors started showing up in things like scientific equipment, cash registers, control consoles, and whatnot, 00:02:15.800 --> 00:02:22.814 we needed displays to allow humans to read and understand the data those processors were spitting out. 00:02:22.814 --> 00:02:30.812 Of course a general-purpose computer could justify using a CRT monitor and generating a video signal to display columns and rows of text, 00:02:30.812 --> 00:02:34.126 but something like a calculator didn’t need all that. 00:02:34.126 --> 00:02:35.926 It just needed to show some numbers. 00:02:35.926 --> 00:02:44.664 So, cheap and simple numerical display devices which microprocessor-based systems could control became a very hot item. 00:02:44.760 --> 00:02:49.032 Over the years equipment manufacturers tried all sorts of ideas. 00:02:49.032 --> 00:02:51.470 One of the most famous is the Nixie tube. 00:02:51.470 --> 00:02:57.882 These neon-filled tubes produced a glow discharge around wire cathodes formed in the shape of numerals, 00:02:57.882 --> 00:03:02.556 resulting in beautifully legible displays which were readable in many conditions. 00:03:02.556 --> 00:03:05.721 But they had a rather huge caveat - 00:03:05.721 --> 00:03:09.925 they required high voltage DC to produce that discharge. 00:03:09.925 --> 00:03:13.394 As in, around 180V. 00:03:13.394 --> 00:03:18.901 That meant that while the tubes were simple, the circuitry required to drive them was complex. 00:03:18.901 --> 00:03:21.154 Not to mention dangerous. 00:03:21.154 --> 00:03:26.000 Because of this, Nixies quite naturally attracted plenty of competition. 00:03:26.000 --> 00:03:29.939 But, many of its contemporaries shared another of its flaws: 00:03:29.939 --> 00:03:34.813 the need for a dedicated output for every character it can display. 00:03:34.813 --> 00:03:43.261 Since Nixies use wire-form numerals, a standard Nixie tube needs 10 inputs to function: one for each of its cathodes. 00:03:43.261 --> 00:03:50.867 But a segmented display which forms numerals by combining different shapes together only needs one output per segment. 00:03:50.867 --> 00:03:57.212 That saves on wiring, but it also makes the circuitry which actually drives the display devices cheaper. 00:03:57.212 --> 00:04:06.837 In the early days, dedicated ICs known as BCD decoders would translate the four bits of binary-coded decimal input they received from a microprocessor 00:04:06.837 --> 00:04:10.408 into the correct output to drive a display device. 00:04:10.408 --> 00:04:15.792 The internal structure of these decoder chips was quite simple - just a few logic gates, really. 00:04:15.792 --> 00:04:24.021 But they could be a lot simpler with a seven-segment display compared with a Nixie tube since there were fewer outputs for it to control. 00:04:24.021 --> 00:04:28.781 And, many of the same outputs are active on multiple inputs. 00:04:28.781 --> 00:04:32.921 A 2 becomes a 3 simply by swapping these two segments, 00:04:32.921 --> 00:04:38.414 and that reduces the number of transistors you need in the chip which makes the chip cheaper. 00:04:38.414 --> 00:04:41.729 That’s extremely in the weeds, though - when we get right down to it, 00:04:41.729 --> 00:04:49.851 the simple fact was the seven-segment display had too many advantages over Nixies, Nimos, edge-lit displays, projection displays 00:04:49.851 --> 00:04:52.426 and all the other wild ideas that were floating around. 00:04:52.426 --> 00:04:57.422 So although they were arguably less readable and more ugly, 00:04:57.422 --> 00:05:02.840 they were obviously going to become the standard  display technology for numerical information. 00:05:04.475 --> 00:05:07.621 Except - it’s not really a technology. 00:05:07.621 --> 00:05:11.603 It’s just a specific graphical representation for numerals. 00:05:11.603 --> 00:05:18.011 So using them may simplify control circuitry and make wiring devices a little easier 00:05:18.011 --> 00:05:21.634 but we still have to figure out how to actually make them! 00:05:21.634 --> 00:05:23.629 And that wasn’t trivial. 00:05:23.629 --> 00:05:30.000 In the late 1960’s, our technology to make small things light up brightly was quite limited. 00:05:30.360 --> 00:05:36.707 We did have teeny little light bulbs, of course,  and we used those in myriad ways (including those projection displays) 00:05:36.707 --> 00:05:42.695 but doing that had a ton of drawbacks, especially visibility in different lighting conditions. 00:05:42.695 --> 00:05:50.151 To maximize contrast under bright ambient light, ideally the glowing element of the display should be directly viewable - 00:05:50.151 --> 00:05:53.357 which was one of the Nixie tube’s greatest strengths. 00:05:53.357 --> 00:05:59.299 So you might just make a seven-segment nixie tube, which was indeed a thing (more or less). 00:05:59.299 --> 00:06:07.883 But glowing neon cathodes still needed the same high-voltage DC as ordinary Nixies which was annoying and expensive to implement. 00:06:07.883 --> 00:06:12.232 Luckily, the vacuum fluorescent display had just popped on the scene. 00:06:12.232 --> 00:06:20.942 These devices required low-er voltage than neon discharge tech which was good,  but the tubes themselves were more complex. 00:06:20.942 --> 00:06:28.858 These vintage IV-11 tubes might look simple enough but a closer look reveals there are several layers here. 00:06:28.858 --> 00:06:35.224 At the front of the tube is a cathode made  of two heater wires which emit electrons through thermionic emission. 00:06:35.224 --> 00:06:45.172 There’s the seven segments forming an 8 at the back, of course, but look closely and you’ll see that right in front of the 8 is a control grid. 00:06:45.172 --> 00:06:52.661 In operation, that grid is positively charged and will absorb  the electrons coming from the cathode wires at the front of the tube. 00:06:52.661 --> 00:06:58.257 But the individual segments behind the grid can also be positively charged. 00:06:58.257 --> 00:07:04.839 When energized, they also attract electrons and are able to  yank some of them through the control grid. 00:07:04.839 --> 00:07:09.858 When those electrons collide with the phosphors on top of the segments, they glow. 00:07:09.858 --> 00:07:11.252 Pretty neat. 00:07:11.252 --> 00:07:13.864 But that’s even more complex than nixies! 00:07:13.864 --> 00:07:17.903 And for every problem they solved they introduced another. 00:07:17.903 --> 00:07:22.179 These tubes didn’t need high voltage,  but they needed two voltages: 00:07:22.179 --> 00:07:28.911 a low voltage for the cathode wires and something around 30 volts for the anodes and control grid. 00:07:28.911 --> 00:07:30.925 Better than 180, of course, 00:07:30.925 --> 00:07:37.823 but still much higher than the logic circuitry of whatever you want to put these in, which was typically 5 volts. 00:07:37.823 --> 00:07:39.786 And, as you might be able to tell, 00:07:39.786 --> 00:07:47.653 these early tubes have pretty poor contrast under even modest ambient lighting since the phosphors are white when unlit. 00:07:47.653 --> 00:07:52.111 So, both neon tech and VFDs had their problems. 00:07:52.111 --> 00:07:59.676 But we were already building a lot of electronic devices which needed numerical displays, and there wasn’t time to wait. 00:07:59.676 --> 00:08:03.561 So, the fine folks at RCA barfed out an idea. 00:08:03.561 --> 00:08:05.254 Here’s my impression of how that went: 00:08:06.616 --> 00:08:07.535 What if… 00:08:08.452 --> 00:08:10.406 why don’t we just make a weird little light bulb? 00:08:10.406 --> 00:08:13.865 [fart noise] And thus explains the Numitron! 00:08:13.865 --> 00:08:19.460 First hitting the market in 1970, these really are just weird little light bulbs… 00:08:19.460 --> 00:08:22.010 but with seven filaments. 00:08:22.010 --> 00:08:28.799 Each filament is stretched across little pegs on a support board so they become the segments of a seven-segment display. 00:08:28.799 --> 00:08:33.999 Then that assembly got shoved into a standard 9-pin miniature vacuum tube enclosure. 00:08:33.999 --> 00:08:42.897 Just apply power to those pins to light up the right combination of those filaments and you technically have a functional digital display device. 00:08:42.897 --> 00:08:51.671 Oh, and this model doesn’t have it, but they were available with a decimal point option which took the form of a tiny little X crossing these four pegs. 00:08:51.671 --> 00:08:58.439 These days, of course, the trendy thing to do with weird old display tubes is to build a clock so that’s what I did. 00:08:58.439 --> 00:09:02.683 But in the spirit of the Numitron, I didn’t bother doing it well! 00:09:02.683 --> 00:09:04.289 I did the bare minimum. 00:09:04.289 --> 00:09:06.100 But it technically works. 00:09:06.100 --> 00:09:09.334 I think that was the slogan for the Numitron! 00:09:09.505 --> 00:09:15.372 Now, I’m about to be rather unkind to this piece of alleged technology 00:09:15.372 --> 00:09:21.772 but before I embark on my tirade where I count all the ways this is just a terrible terrible product, 00:09:21.772 --> 00:09:25.000 I need to admit that I also kind of like them. 00:09:25.000 --> 00:09:31.339 I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of building seven-segment displays out of weird things. 00:09:31.339 --> 00:09:36.947 Like, imagine a clock where each segment is a four-foot fluorescent tube. 00:09:36.947 --> 00:09:39.933 You could read that thing from miles away! 00:09:39.933 --> 00:09:43.337 And, uh, when I was in college, 00:09:43.337 --> 00:09:47.863 I built a giant clock where the segments were sections of LED tape. 00:09:47.863 --> 00:09:49.529 RGB, of course. 00:09:49.529 --> 00:09:53.412 So Numitrons are very much up my alley. 00:09:53.412 --> 00:10:01.125 And while today the use of incandescent filaments  in a seven-segment display might seem objectively absurd, 00:10:01.125 --> 00:10:04.088 that was in fact the point! 00:10:04.088 --> 00:10:09.630 These tubes are dead simple and require nothing special at all to use. 00:10:09.630 --> 00:10:13.875 They only need 5V to glow, so they didn’t need their own power supply. 00:10:13.875 --> 00:10:19.828 Incandescent filaments are self-regulating, too, so there’s no need to add current-limiting resistors to the circuit. 00:10:19.828 --> 00:10:25.972 And since they were so tiny the segments only consumed about 25 mA each. 00:10:25.972 --> 00:10:35.315 This is actually the largest version of the tubes RCA made, but they don't even consume a watt of power with all segments lit. 00:10:35.315 --> 00:10:42.126 The ridiculous simplicity of these meant that you could drive them directly from a seven-segment BCD decoder chip, 00:10:42.126 --> 00:10:47.146 all powered by the same 5V supply as the rest of your newfangled digital widget. 00:10:47.240 --> 00:10:53.000 That would save money in the hardware design,  and since the Numitron itself is so freaking simple,   00:10:53.000 --> 00:10:56.137 the display tubes were cheaper than the competition. 00:10:56.137 --> 00:10:59.249 So it wasn’t a terrible idea. 00:10:59.249 --> 00:11:07.845 But, as you might be able to tell just from looking at them, the execution of the idea left quite a lot to be desired. 00:11:07.845 --> 00:11:12.771 If I could describe these in a word, it would be janky. 00:11:12.771 --> 00:11:15.379 Or perhaps slapdash. 00:11:15.379 --> 00:11:20.247 Nothing about these feels like a finished product that should exist. 00:11:20.247 --> 00:11:22.923 They just look way too crude! 00:11:22.923 --> 00:11:30.513 The extremely thin segments lead to them being not very legible, and the arrangement of those segments is just… 00:11:30.513 --> 00:11:31.584 awful. 00:11:31.584 --> 00:11:33.769 There’s way too much of a gap between them 00:11:33.769 --> 00:11:41.457 and the vertical segments extend uncomfortably beyond the top and bottom segments which just looks weird. 00:11:41.457 --> 00:11:50.841 And they didn’t lean the 8 to accommodate the decimal point at the bottom so the display is off-center in the tube which is infuriating. 00:11:50.841 --> 00:11:53.304 But its problems don’t end there. 00:11:53.304 --> 00:11:56.433 Do you notice something wrong about the background? 00:11:56.433 --> 00:12:03.624 For reasons that I cannot fathom, RCA decided to make the support board for the filaments grey. 00:12:03.624 --> 00:12:05.259 That was a mistake. 00:12:05.259 --> 00:12:08.747 It should be black, or at least as dark as possible. 00:12:08.747 --> 00:12:17.698 Because, ya see, any ambient light that hits these things is going to brighten that background and make the glowing filaments harder to see. 00:12:17.698 --> 00:12:21.310 And, if that weren’t enough, even in a pitch-black room 00:12:21.310 --> 00:12:26.814 the filaments themselves illuminate that support board enough to where contrast is reduced, 00:12:26.814 --> 00:12:33.130 making the already kind of hard to parse numbers just a little bit harder to identify. 00:12:33.130 --> 00:12:39.797 Now, I will give them the benefit of the doubt and say that there could be some materials reason this isn’t black - 00:12:39.797 --> 00:12:45.075 maybe a nice, dark background wouldn’t survive the heat of the glass-sealing process. 00:12:45.075 --> 00:12:50.077 But I mean, these VFD tubes have a much darker background so… 00:12:50.160 --> 00:12:58.180 And it might be hard to tell but these aren’t even straight - and I don’t mean my handwork when installing the sockets. 00:12:58.180 --> 00:13:05.013 The internal support structure holding the filaments is leaning noticeably in several of these tubes 00:13:05.013 --> 00:13:09.833 so with all the tubes fully seated, the numbers are slightly crooked 00:13:09.833 --> 00:13:16.833 and with multiple tubes you’ll never have a perfectly aligned display unless you commit to a lot of fiddling. 00:13:16.833 --> 00:13:23.281 Honestly, I don’t think anyone at RCA was particularly proud of these things. 00:13:23.281 --> 00:13:27.202 I mean, if they were, I would think they would have tried a little harder. 00:13:27.202 --> 00:13:28.777 Just look at the datasheet. 00:13:28.777 --> 00:13:32.153 These are the other varieties RCA sold. 00:13:32.153 --> 00:13:34.578 A plus or minus tube. 00:13:34.578 --> 00:13:35.681 Wow. 00:13:35.681 --> 00:13:38.683 And a plus or minus 1 tube. 00:13:38.683 --> 00:13:41.118 Really workin’ hard over there. 00:13:41.118 --> 00:13:45.451 In this promo piece about them, we don’t learn whose idea this was. 00:13:45.451 --> 00:13:50.737 We just hear from Robert D. Reichert, the manager of the whole dang tube design department. 00:13:50.737 --> 00:13:56.316 And RCA didn’t bother putting a patent number or  even patent pending on these boxes 00:13:56.316 --> 00:13:59.210 which are specifically branded Numitron. 00:13:59.210 --> 00:14:02.306 That made me wonder if they even bothered patenting it. 00:14:02.306 --> 00:14:06.653 Honestly the only nice thing about these is their name: Numitron. 00:14:06.653 --> 00:14:08.275 That’s pretty cool. 00:14:08.275 --> 00:14:10.113 But it’s also lazy! 00:14:10.113 --> 00:14:14.771 This is literally just numi (short for numerical I guess) and tron. 00:14:14.771 --> 00:14:19.881 And back then tron was as infectious a buzzword as AI is today. 00:14:19.960 --> 00:14:23.698 I was starting to lose my mind over the origin of these things. 00:14:23.698 --> 00:14:26.936 The idea seems simultaneously too obvious 00:14:26.936 --> 00:14:30.706 (this write-up in Popular Electronics even says as much) 00:14:30.706 --> 00:14:34.361 yet these are also just… not good. 00:14:34.361 --> 00:14:39.085 I could not rest until I found the patent and who invented these. 00:14:39.085 --> 00:14:41.712 Luckily I did, and here it is. 00:14:41.712 --> 00:14:47.414 Apparently these were the brainchild of Richard Arthur Bonnette and Norman Lee Lindburg. 00:14:47.414 --> 00:14:55.497 Now, RCA was a huge research-driven organization back then so it’s plausible that these were just two names pulled out of a hat 00:14:55.497 --> 00:14:58.275 and I kind of hope it was. 00:14:58.275 --> 00:15:01.442 This does not scream quality. 00:15:01.442 --> 00:15:08.058 Editor’s note: while looking for a different patent (the one showing the projection displays which used little light bulbs) 00:15:08.058 --> 00:15:11.984 I ran across this patent issued in 1959 to Art Garfunkl - 00:15:11.984 --> 00:15:14.443 I mean A. R. Garfinkel. 00:15:14.443 --> 00:15:22.180 And… well, sure enough the idea was too obvious and RCA was not the first to have this idea. 00:15:22.180 --> 00:15:25.104 The implementation here is very different, though - 00:15:25.104 --> 00:15:31.889 it’s in a flat package (which is gonna come up again later) but most importantly, if I’m understanding the diagrams correctly, 00:15:31.889 --> 00:15:38.429 the filaments are producing light indirectly  and it’s guided towards a mask with small slits at the front. 00:15:38.429 --> 00:15:46.073 I’m guessing this concept never made it to production, and that drawing implies it’s got the widest bezels you’ve ever seen. 00:15:46.073 --> 00:15:48.185 But I wanted to throw it in here. 00:15:48.185 --> 00:15:53.800 You can see from the datasheet that RCA was grasping at straws trying to sell these things. 00:15:53.800 --> 00:15:59.648 Oh sure, low-voltage operation is very real and  objectively a good differentiator. 00:15:59.648 --> 00:16:03.812 But “void of clutter” is clearly a dig at Nixies, 00:16:03.812 --> 00:16:13.257 and the whole “oh, it’s incandescent with a wide spectral output so you can use color filters to obtain a display of any desired color” is true, 00:16:13.257 --> 00:16:14.923 but a stretch. 00:16:14.923 --> 00:16:18.345 I mean, sure, but good luck with blue. 00:16:18.345 --> 00:16:26.196 RCA designed them to last 100,000 hours and, well, that’s only gonna be possible if the filaments burn quite dimly. 00:16:26.196 --> 00:16:32.900 So they’re not producing much light towards the blue end of the spectrum and a blue filter will really cut their output. 00:16:32.900 --> 00:16:38.582 Now, to be fair the tubes can be a lot  brighter than they appear in this clock. 00:16:38.582 --> 00:16:45.834 They’re power-limited here thanks to the BCD decoders I had which are not capable of passing 25 mA. 00:16:45.834 --> 00:16:51.143 If I apply 5 volts directly to a tube, we can see that it can get this bright. 00:16:51.143 --> 00:16:52.811 Which is honestly impressive! 00:16:52.811 --> 00:16:57.770 That’s definitely brighter than a Nixie tube, and whiter than I was expecting. 00:16:57.770 --> 00:17:04.988 But this also really reveals how much the filaments  are brightening the background and reducing contrast. 00:17:04.988 --> 00:17:07.501 That really shouldn’t be grey. 00:17:07.501 --> 00:17:10.397 I mean you didn’t need a rocket surgeon to tell you that. 00:17:11.000 --> 00:17:14.835 While RCA didn’t seem to try very hard here, 00:17:14.835 --> 00:17:18.404 the concept was valuable enough to attract clones. 00:17:18.404 --> 00:17:23.889 There are plenty of variants available that were made in the USSR, but those are even worse! 00:17:23.889 --> 00:17:28.840 These IV-9 tubes have filaments that sag under their own weight. 00:17:29.600 --> 00:17:35.440 Later, incandescent seven-segment displays just  like Numitrons but in flat packages appeared,   00:17:35.440 --> 00:17:40.738 and for some reason I have a memory that they  were common in gas pumps for a brief time 00:17:40.738 --> 00:17:43.930 but literally I have no idea why that’s in my head. 00:17:43.930 --> 00:17:46.172 I just read it somewhere somewhen. 00:17:46.172 --> 00:17:49.764 Those clones were all short-lived, though,  just like the Numitron, 00:17:49.764 --> 00:17:53.449 because of a little thing called the light-emitting diode. 00:17:53.449 --> 00:18:01.397 They had already been invented by the time RCA got the Numitron out the door, but they were extremely expensive in 1970. 00:18:01.397 --> 00:18:10.748 And, the first seven-segment displays which used LEDs were tiny things where each segment was actually multiple LEDs on a tiny little chip, 00:18:10.748 --> 00:18:17.597 and they relied on magnification lenses to make the tiny glowing digital dots appear larger. 00:18:17.597 --> 00:18:21.212 That’s why the Numitron made sense to use. 00:18:21.212 --> 00:18:26.202 But it didn’t take long at all for LEDs to get cheap,  and once they did? 00:18:26.202 --> 00:18:28.461 The Numitron was doomed. 00:18:28.461 --> 00:18:34.463 LED packages like this quickly became the  defacto standard for seven-segment displays. 00:18:34.463 --> 00:18:41.891 These are much like those really early and large displays where ordinary light bulbs were stuck down holes with lenses on the front, 00:18:41.891 --> 00:18:46.086 but miniaturized by replacing the light bulbs with tiny LEDs. 00:18:46.086 --> 00:18:54.656 Those LEDs are firing up at small lenses embedded in epoxy resin and that forms an incredibly rugged and simple structure. 00:18:54.656 --> 00:19:02.707 The lens shapes can also be tweaked for maximum legibility, and resin’s a lot easier to deal with than glass, too. 00:19:02.707 --> 00:19:08.161 So once production lines for these things  spun up the Numitron just looked ridiculous. 00:19:08.161 --> 00:19:11.354 And let’s not forget the vacuum fluorescent display. 00:19:11.354 --> 00:19:15.505 These things are still in use today - in fact there’s one in my stove. 00:19:15.505 --> 00:19:21.949 The single-digit tube form factor found here became just as ridiculous as the Numitron before long, 00:19:21.949 --> 00:19:26.918 but its the problems with contrast in ambient light were easily fixed with filtering 00:19:26.918 --> 00:19:33.017 and soon we learned how to make VFDs flat and pack  them with hundreds of individual segments. 00:19:33.017 --> 00:19:41.443 You might have 8 seven-segement displays all in a single package for a calculator, or even dot-matrix alphanumeric displays. 00:19:41.443 --> 00:19:49.244 Through multiplexing, a technique where the entire display is broken up into several sections addressed one at a time in rapid succession, 00:19:49.244 --> 00:19:55.963 we could make very complicated and very customizable  displays featuring custom graphics and multiple colors, 00:19:55.963 --> 00:20:00.981 all with excellent readability, longevity, and simple control circuits. 00:20:00.981 --> 00:20:04.485 Oh, right and then there was the liquid-crystal display. 00:20:04.485 --> 00:20:07.981 Which, funnily enough, was invented by George Heilmeier 00:20:07.981 --> 00:20:09.763 at RCA! 00:20:09.763 --> 00:20:11.952 And before the Numitron! 00:20:12.646 --> 00:20:20.119 It took quite a while to become viable, though, and RCA’s first version used a concept called dynamic scattering mode, 00:20:20.119 --> 00:20:21.723 and wasn’t super great. 00:20:21.723 --> 00:20:27.884 Other innovators improved upon it over the years,  and I’m really only including it as a footnote since it wasn’t self-illuminating 00:20:27.884 --> 00:20:34.510 and it was not quite a contemporary of the Numitron, at least not ones that actually worked well. 00:20:34.510 --> 00:20:38.455 But once we figured them out the Numitron looked even sillier. 00:20:38.455 --> 00:20:41.853 Still, I can’t help but admire the Numitron. 00:20:41.853 --> 00:20:50.379 It’s perhaps the perfect example of the phrase “so crazy it just might work” distilled into a product. 00:20:50.379 --> 00:20:53.888 Trouble was, while it did technically work, 00:20:53.888 --> 00:21:00.249 its advantages became irrelevant approximately seven minutes after RCA brought it to market. 00:21:00.249 --> 00:21:07.673 Of course that’s not entirely true, but I am all but certain that device manufacturers, when shopping for display technologies, 00:21:07.673 --> 00:21:13.020 looked at how poorly these render numbers and how jankily they were constructed 00:21:13.020 --> 00:21:18.303 and quickly concluded they’d rather pay more for something a little more polished. 00:21:18.303 --> 00:21:22.646 Slapping these in your digital device screamed cheap. 00:21:22.646 --> 00:21:25.493 If there’s a lesson we can learn from the Numitron, 00:21:25.493 --> 00:21:32.552 it’s probably that there are times where the simplest possible option really is too simple. 00:21:32.552 --> 00:21:37.949 If it had a little more time in the oven and RCA tried executing it a little better, 00:21:37.949 --> 00:21:40.814 maybe it would have seen more success. 00:21:40.814 --> 00:21:46.302 But it was always going to be stuck with the shapes you can make with a filament. 00:21:46.302 --> 00:21:49.642 In other words, thin, straight lines. 00:21:49.642 --> 00:21:55.511 With every other display technology offering much more legible characters and even custom glyphs, 00:21:55.511 --> 00:22:02.587 the Numitron would never be able to branch out beyond seven-segment and maybe alphanumeric displays. 00:22:02.587 --> 00:22:06.021 But I’ll bet those would look even worse than this. 00:22:06.021 --> 00:22:10.836 But hey, at least they managed to get it to market when it actually made some sense. 00:22:10.836 --> 00:22:13.045 Unlike that Videodisc player. 00:22:13.045 --> 00:22:14.525 Oh look, LEDs! 00:22:15.467 --> 00:22:18.013 ♫ slapdashedly smooth jazz ♫ 00:22:19.128 --> 00:22:20.334 I have to record that line again. 00:22:20.334 --> 00:22:23.148 Ignore all the continuity errors.... 00:22:23.148 --> 00:22:24.396 It’s a running clock. 00:22:24.396 --> 00:22:26.035 For your benefit… 00:22:26.035 --> 00:22:28.600 [waits until the hour rollover] 00:22:31.548 --> 00:22:32.452 OK 00:22:32.452 --> 00:22:36.119 …and, since the Numitron itself is so dang simple, 00:22:36.119 --> 00:22:38.382 the tubes werech cheap chchpbbt. 00:22:40.141 --> 00:22:40.908 Fell apart. 00:22:40.908 --> 00:22:44.945 The earliest known representation of them is this eh debekadababa 00:22:44.945 --> 00:22:47.478 Ah, the seven-segment display. 00:22:47.478 --> 00:22:49.481 Make an aight… what? 00:22:49.481 --> 00:22:54.563 The use of incandescent filaments in a seven-segment display might seem objectibely… 00:22:54.563 --> 00:22:55.863 objectibely? 00:22:55.863 --> 00:23:00.731 Because of this, Nixies quite naturally attracted plenty of commetition. 00:23:00.731 --> 00:23:03.425 But, I’ve… mmm. 00:23:05.209 --> 00:23:08.198 RCA really did some numbers here, didn't they? 00:23:08.198 --> 00:23:11.004 Or should I say, they really did a number on themselves? 00:23:11.004 --> 00:23:14.194 Perhaps this is the product that signaled the beginning of the end for RCA. 00:23:14.194 --> 00:23:17.039 Imagine if they had stuck Numitron tubes in the Selectivision players though. 00:23:17.039 --> 00:23:20.894 Maybe that would have sold it!