Nixies

On a day in 1969, late at the office where I was one of the proofreaders of the new compiuterized NY phone book, a salesman cold-calling businesses in the building wandered in trying to sell a new kind of desk calculator. He wasn't going to make a sale there, but he showed it off for us anyway: it was a beauty, dark and mysterious. The row of numbers at the top were alight, somehow, little orange ghosts inside glass tubes; at the press of a button they'd change. If you looked closely you could see that surrounding the digit that was alight were silver threads of all the other nine digits that could light up. Well, on remembering this, I of course repaired to the Web, where in a few minutes I found technical descriptions and pictures of machines like that one, though they all seemed a tad less wonderful. And I learned the name of those magic numbers: they are "Nixie tubes." "Nixie" from NIX-I, a technical designation, but also of course the word for a magic water-sprite. Here's a picture.