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Developing The Nimo Display Tube - The Untold Story!
🕑 Added 2020-10-14 04:12:01 +0000 UTCAt last, the truth can be known! IEE internal documents sent in by a viewer who worked on developing the Nimo Tube tell the long and frustrating tale of its design, development, manufacture, and early promotion. Lets get to it!
Comments
Fran Blanche
No, they used a combination of rear projection displays and incandescent 7-segment lightbox displays like the ones I 3-d printed a few years ago.
BobC
I wonder if Apollo used any nimo tubes in Mission Control...
Matt Wietlispach
Wow! You won the Lotto here! To find the designer of such a creative and rare artifact is beyond comprehension!
William Nimmo
Oh I Love You!!! That is so assume I really like your pronouncing my sir name Nimmo Or Nimo as it was in the old country LOL If You Could could you make me a copy of that If not I understand. Just that your hoarding all them tubes! You Keep on making these videos Hope your safe .Take care William Nimmo Nimo!
On the Chronavoice, I found this patent which looks like it. It seems to be based on a rotating magnetic drum. It appears to only read the digits individually i.e. says "two zero" instead of "twenty". https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/bd/12/e1/2a6c3be739bbb0/US3469038.pdf
Fred Niell
A little bit about the Chronavoice ... https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-TV-&-Communications/TV-and-Communications/TV&C-1965-05.pdf
Anton
Oh wow, neat. Thanks for sharing
lohphat
IEE still exists today as an aerospace display manufacturer. https://ieeinc.com Would this still be considered internal company proprietary docs? I can't think they would care after 50 years but lawyers are paid to lawyer.
Great Joe
I do hope this gets scanned and put on archive.org
Peter Knazko
Fascinating history of the Nimo. Astonishing that it took around a decade to get it out into the market. Those were obviously different times, where in that time we went from Sputnik, through the Beatles invasion, to a man on the moon, while IEE was still trying to get this product "just right". In that time also the transistor went from fringe to mainstream, to being embedded into what became known as "integrated circuits". If made available in the early 60s, the "Nimo" could have cornered the market on display tubes for half a decade. Life's a crap shoot, especially in tech. Great story, Fran.
John Laur
Wow just showed someone your Nimo tube video this weekend. Never expected this was around the corner! Good luck with this video. Hope it is as popular as the original.
