Where to start? I made my first radio (valve) when I was about 9 (parts from HL Smiths in Tottenham Court Road), was a very science-based kid (with a lots of arts & drama too). We had all sorts of nice kit at school, including a load of dekatron counters for stuff like timing intervals and scintillations... seem to recall some nixie stuff too.
Did electronic engineering and a load of maths & physics at university - lots of equipment there had nixies/dekatrons, but everything was moving to LED so stuff was being chucked, so started pickup up tubes in the late 70s... I started realizing I had a collecting problem when my girlfriends at the time were complaining about entire rooms full of stuff - since those days I've sold most of the big kit and concentrated on the nixies (and audio valves) - as of this morning, about 12,000 valves in the stock list, of which about 8,000 are nixies, VFDs, Panaplex etc. Just fell in love with that orange glow - always liked signs too... tried making signs myself, but it's very very tough... I should point out that I also collect some other stuff, so it's obviously a personality trait. Maybe a good one. Maybe not... Luckily SWMBO (of 30 years this year!) is extremely understanding - I have a separate building for my workshops so most stuff is out of the house. I've been lucky enough to know John Smout who has been a fount of useful information on design - my forte is definitely just on the electronic front. I only worked as an EE whilst paying off the student sponsorship - I was put through university on a scholarship from ITT and worked at STL Harlow (where fiber optics were discovered). Designed a bit of the Dopplar MLS (Microwave Landing System) for Harrier jump jets and some other nice stuff, then decided EE wasn't for me professionally, so moved into the software arena and became a h/w & s/w design engineer for DEC (Digital Equipment Corp) in France (Annecy & Valbonne), Switzerland (Geneva & Zurich), the UK (DEC Park in Reading) and a bit in Maynard, MA. Then moved into the Fintech world: Had a few startups, a couple of which crashed and burnt and a couple that did OK. Retired for a bit, got bored and am now a CTO for a charitable fund in the Gulf region, so am 3,500 miles away from my workshops... (though I have quite a nice small one here now and there is a good Makerspace nearby) Main interest now is in designing micro-power IoT environmental monitors - these are based around the MSP430 series of processors from TI. Nick -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to neonixie-l+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send an email to neonixie-l@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/c8a24304-c2c7-4a0e-84fb-f61b15705f3e%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
