I was fiddling for a while with various display technologies. LCDs were cool in the ’80s. A year ago I re-discovered Nixies – beautiful, amazing, but hard to build any usable displays for a computer (even a calculator needs signs, periods, etc. in addition to the digits). It turns out that I had the solution affront of me, in the center of our car’s dashboard: VFDs!
A quick search around, and I made my choice: it will be a Noritake Itron VDF display. And let’s make it big! Just imagine what an 80’s pocket computer (OK, one of the bigger ones like the HP-75x) could have been with a display like this one!
