frantone
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The First Big LED Displays! 1975 Dialco 7-Segment
🕑 Added 2023-11-27 01:55:56 +0000 UTCI have never encountered anything like this so early. In the incandescent, VFD, and Panaplex era of large bright displays this upstart module is using bright light emitting diodes? And they're not microscopic? Yes! A real rare find, and I go all-in to get this running and demo it for you. Enjoy!
Comments
Fran Blanche
These LED's would have been very expensive, so definitely would not have been cheap.
Fran Blanche
Who knows... I'd like to find out who they sourced them from.
Dr Andy Hill
My thought as to why they bothered to use LEDs rather than incandescent for this is less heat generated and possibly longer life too. But this is far from my area of expertise. So I'll probably get shot down here.
William
Wonder if the LED chemistry is early gallium nitride
Zygmunt Dean
Wow! Feels a good 5 years ahead of its time, excellent find Fran! π
Fred Niell
amazing
adrian
Early LEDs were very dim, though - I remember using some that were OK for panel indicators but finding some bright enough for this job must have been a challenge. Maybe not possible until large green leds appeared (and reds were brighter by then). I did mostly use 0.1" LEDs and I wonder if 0.2" were brighter. Probably just the same die with a bigger lens though.
David Peaker
Any kind of display themed video always gets my vote.
Keri Szafir
I'm not surprised. The standard 7seg LED could perfectly evolve from a lightguide incandescent, only replacing bulbs with diodes available back then. Miniaturization would have come later.
-Jeff-
It amazed me that this technology was ramping up in the mid 70's.
