Tubes out of the former soviet states....how big is the supply?

[Trumpeter]

I've been slowly hoarding various Nixie tubes mostly out of ten Soviet states, due to the rediculiously low prices for those tubes especially the IN12. Any idea on how deep the supply is? It seems unending.

[gregebert]

Based on the date-codes on my  Soviet tubes, some of them as recent as 1992, I think an extreme oversupply was created as demand fell-off in favor of newer devices, such as LEDs. My theory is that during the Soviet era, the government ran all of the manufacturing facilities and they kept cranking-out tubes even if there was no demand; they didn't actually need to sell those nixies to keep the factory running because the govt. paid for it. In contrast, nixie manufacturers in the US/ western Europe shut-down production as soon as demand went down, so massive stockpiles never resulted. Most of my Burroughs tubes were manufactured between 1963 and 1966, and perhaps a straggler from the early 1970's.

[David Forbes]

I see a lot of Burroughs/ITT 5870 tubes from 1973, and I have boxes of
National Electronics 5870 and 4998 tubes with date codes as late as
1980. Although National Electronics was in the habit of stamping the
current date on old stocks as they were sold - I once had a hundred
5870L tubes with 2002 date codes!

On 10/1/2016 10:56 AM, gregebert wrote:
> Most of my Burroughs tubes were
> manufactured between 1963 and 1966, and perhaps a straggler from the
> early 1970's.
>

--
David Forbes, Tucson AZ