Before there was any such thing as an LCD, people used nixie tubes to display numbers on electrical testing equipment. A nixie tube looks a lot like a vacuum tube, but it’s filled with neon, and it contains a stack of ten electrodes, each in the shape of a single digit. When a current runs through an electrode, the digit lights up.
People have been building clocks with nixie tubes for decades. I would give my eyeteeth for some of these clocks. (Scroll down to see Geoff Tomlin’s, which is my favorite; it looks like something out of Brazil.)
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