Historical Photos -- Nixies

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Ultronic Systems Lectrascan
Stock Market Ticker Display

In the 1960's Ultronic Systems developed a stock market quotation "ticker" display panel using the Burroughs B-7971 Nixie tubes to display stock market symbols and prices in real time as received over dedicated telephone lines. Contrary to popular belief, these tubes were not used on the main floor of the exchanges, but rather were installed in brokerage houses throughout the United States. (2.5 inch characters may have been too small for the main floor of the NYSE.) Ultronic claimed that over 3000 units were in service at one point. Let's see, 3000 times 48 tubes = 144 thousand nixie tubes. (Where are they now?)

Up until now few nixie lovers have ever seen the Lectrascan units. Thanks to Scott Bowman, one of these units was rescued from a brokerage house in Marin County, California with plans to make it display text messages.

Unfortunately, that never happened. The Lectrascan units were too specific to stock quotation needs, and one board with two display tubes could not simultaneously display two letters. The unit accepted 5-bit Baudot code, commonly used in early Teletype machines, and which has two sets of up to 30 characters along with a FIGS (numerals) and LTRS (alphabetic letters) code-switching character, similar to a modern keyboard shift key that selects either numbers or punctuation characters, except that the "shift" is a character that is sent to switch between the character sets. The decoding of this character code was too elementary and limiting to be practical, so the conversion of this 48-tube display to general text was never done by Scott and his brother.

This is the front view of the Lectrascan with all 24 nixie boards installed:

Here you see the logic boards that are mounted between some of the nixie display cards:

Here you see some of the logic cards removed:

This view is of the backplane where logic signals and power are bussed together between the boards. Note the two wires that are at an angle. These carry the serial data that was sent down the rows. It is important to note that these units did NOT SCROLL characters. All character were fixed in position, and a three-character-wide "eraser" swept along from left to right to erase the last characters and write a new set of characters.

Finally here is a single-page cut-sheet from Ultronic Systems that describes two different display devices, the Lectrascan, and a newer one (Ultrascan, which used small neon lamps) which did scroll. The Lectrascan nixie underbar segment indicated prices in 1/8ths of a dollar, since stock prices at that time were sold in binary fractions of the dollar. Thus the display shows prices of 30, 20-5/8, 116-3/4 and 270-1/4. The last symbol for UNC indicates that 2000 shares traded at 28-3/4. (I wonder if there is any historical database that could pinpoint the date (and time!) that this photo was taken, based on the prices.)

Credits:
Photos by Scott Bowman, July 2006.
Ultronic cutsheet from an ex-Ultronic engineer named Reed via David Forbes.

Revision 3 on 28.08.06