Sanyo ICC-82D - Charger or Mods

[David Carter]

Hi just finished getting the ICC-82D working. Made a new 3d printed battery box with new cells. Don't have a charger was wondering if anyone has made a replacement one for these or modified the charge port to just act as a simple way to connect to the battery pack. 

[Friedrich]

I love this Calculator! Of this ICC 82 D there exist two variants: Nixie or 7 segment (like yours).

[Owen Savill]

Those are 3rd gen Nixie tubes, aren't they?

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[David Carter]

I believe they are 8 digits amber gas-discharge tubes.

Wish they were some form of nixie tubes!

[Owen Savill]

Are they not "Nixie" tubes? <http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/calculator_displays.html#ColdCathode>

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[David Carter]

Here is a close up.

[Rick B]

These tubs are not Nixie tubes.  They work on a similar principal to Nixie tubes.  There are no "generations" of Nixie tubes...a Nixie tube is a Nixie tube, with one exception, the rather uncommon Pandicon tube.  The distinction that makes a Nixie tube a Nixie tube is that the digits are formed from wires that are shaped like the digits.  There are no Nixie tubes that have segments, the digits are continually formed, e.g., a 2 <-- looks just like that, while...

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 ---       <---  ...is not a digit formed by any type of Nixie tube.

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The Pandicon tube is special in that it has fully formed digits like a Nixie tube, but instead of an individual tube for each digit, multiple digits (8, 10, or 12, generally) are all packaged inside the same glass tube, next to each other; see the attachment for an example from a Lago Calc LC-816 calculator.   The Pandicon is /not/ classified as a Nixie tube, but it is a separate type of tube, even though it has fully-formed digits like a Nixie tube, so calling a tube like this a Nixie tube is technically incorrect.

It should be noted that originally Burroughs in the US patented the Nixie tube.  A number of Japanese companies, including most notably Hitachi,along with a few others, copied the Nixie tube and sold them in Japan to companies like Hayakawa Electric (Sharp) and others for use in their calculators.    The US Federal Trade Commission got involved with the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry(MITI), and an agreement was forged where Japanese companies that manufactured Nixie tube calculators would have to pay a royalty to Burroughs for every single digit of Nixie tube that was sold by Japanese calculator manufacturers.   So, the Japanese calculator manufacturers had to keep track of the number of digits worth of calculators they had sold, and make a payment to Burroughs for the total count of digits.   This is why Japanese calculator makers quickly moved to other types of display technology, such as the seven-segment gas-discharge displays, as well as the Japanese-invented vacuum-fluorescent displays which have segments (seven, sometimes more) that light up light blue.   Anything with digits that are made up of segments, like those mentioned above, while frequently called Nixie tubes because they are in glass tubes like Nixies, are not Nixie tubes.

I hope this clarifies things for folks.

Rick Bensene

The Old Calculator Museum

https://oldcalculatormuseum.com

Beavercreek, Oregon  USA

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[Owen Savill]

Hi Rick,

Many thanks for this clear explanation. Would it be accurate to say that the Nixie tube evolved in to the tubes in the original post? 

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[Rick B]

Greetings, Owen and all,

I don't know if I would say it is accurate to call it an evolution in the pure sense of the word, because generally there are various stages in an evolution, and in the case of Nixie tubes to Gas Discharge seven-segment tubes, there were no intermediate types of tubes.   Both display technologies are cold-cathode (e.g., no heater element to give off electrons like in an old-style vacuum-tube used in TVs and radios in their early days) devices with similar gas chemistries inside the tubes, and operate on roughly the same voltage, but that is where the similarities end.  

Vacuum fluorescent display tubes were a  completely different technology.  They had a heater element in the tube, like an old vacuum tube, which was a source of electrons. The cathodes were phosphor-coated segments in the seven-segment (and sometimes more) layout, and when a positive voltage was applied to a segment cathode, the electrons from the heater element would be attracted to the cathode, hitting the phosphor, making it glow in a bright, generally light-blue color.  Like the segmented gas-discharge tubes, lighting different patterns of the segments resulted in a reasonable representation of a numeral.    

I'd say that the VF tubes were not an evolution of the Nixie tube, at least from a technology standpoint.

I would say, though, that both display tube technologies were developed out of a desire to create an easier to manufacture and thus lower-cost display than Nixie tubes, which were pretty fussy to build. With all of the digit cathodes stacked up on top of each other with very little space between them, and an anode grid placed in front of the stack of digit-shaped cathodes, all packed inside a glass envelope with a fairly tightly controlled amount of neon and other gasses pumped in at a slight amount of pressure inside the tube, and sealed such that the gas would not leak out of the tube through the holes in the bottom of the tube where the wires came out.   Nixie tubes were considerably higher cost display technology than the gas-discharge and vacuum-fluorescent display tubes that succeeded them, especially once these later technologies that integrated multiple digits inside a single glass envelope or panel.

Another type of gas-discharge display technology that came after the individual gas-discharge display tubes had been developed, eventually displacing individual tubes, was Burroughs' Panaplex planar gas-discharge display technology.  This technology was as the Nixie tube was to the Pandicon tube...where rather than having separate tubes for each digit, all of the digits were combined into one package, though in this case, the package was planar (flat) as opposed to a glass envelope.  This display was called the Burroughs Panaplex display. Panaplex technology used glass plates, one with a clear anodes, one for each digit, and another with clear cathodes printed on the glass in the shape of the segments that created the numerals, with the two plates separated by a small distance, and the space between them filled with the Neon gas mixture.  This allowed quite a few digits to be combined into one flat display panel.   

A Japanese company whose name I can't recall at the moment created a similar planar gas-discharge display, but was different enough in design that it didn't violate Burroughs' patent on Panaplex.  They called the display "Flattron". Rather than printing clear conductors on glass like Panaplex, the Flattron used a thin metal plate with the shape of the segments cut out of it for each digit, connected as the anodes.  A flat ceramic base material with the segment shapes printed on it using a thin metal paste was positioned a short distance behind the anode plates, were the cathodes.  The assembly was placed in a stamped metal tub, with the pins for the anodes and cathodes coming through glass-frit sealed holes in the back of the tub.  Across the top of the tub, a pane of glass was sealed to the edges of the tub with some type of adhesive and seal.  A small amount of gas similar to that used in a regular gas-discharge display tube  was injected into the assembly. The glass pane provided a window for the viewer to see the display.    When a given numeral segment cathode, along with a digit anode had sufficient electrical potential across them, the gas would glow in the shape of the segment showing through the segment-shaped cutouts in the digit anode.

Both Panaplex and Flattron planar displays had all of the like numeral segments connected together inside the display panel, so that changing segment patterns applied as a potential (for a lit segment) or lack of potential(for a dark segment) were applied to all of the cathodes at the same time, but only the digit with the anode energized would have its segments glow, creating the pattern of a numeral.  This scheme of connecting all of the cathodes together and only energizing the segments for each numeral momentarily, as well as  energizing the anodes sequentially was called multiplexing, and dramatically reduced the complexity and component count of display coding and drive circuitry.   For example, a Sharp Compet 20 calculator (fall, 1965), which did not use multiplexed display technology, had  roughly 268 transistors in its display drive circuitry alone.   The Sharp Compet 32, a later(mid-1967) machine that was Sharp's first calculator to use a multiplexed display scheme (with Nixie tubes), used roughly 37 transistors, and it had two more digits of capacity than the Compet 20! 

The number of soldered connections in a calculator was a very important design criteria for reliability.  Reducing the number of soldered connections to components would increase reliability, as soldered connections were an opportunity for a bad solder-joint to cause a malfunction.  Less solder joints meant less chance for a problem in production, and once in the customer's hands.

Individual tube-type displays required n*12 soldered connections, with n being the number of digits in the display system. For example, a  twelve-digit display would require 144 soldered connections to all of the tubes in the display.   A planar-type display like the Panaplex only required n+8 soldered connections, with the same twelve-digit display requiring only 20 solder connections, significantly increasing reliability.  

The reduction of solder connections was one of the factors leading to the use of small-scale integrated circuits to replace discrete components, and later to the use of large-scale integrated circuits, both of which combined the equivalent of (early IC's) perhaps ten to fifty components on a single chip that might have fourteen to sixteen soldered connections compared to up to 100 or so connections for the same circuitry implemented with discrete components.  Early LSI IC's contained hundreds to thousands of equivalent components on a single chip, with perhaps 28 to 40 solder connections per chip.   While the benefits to the use of integrated circuits in calculators are obvious as far as the reduction in size, power requirement, cooling, and overall complexity, the reduction in the number of soldered connections through the use of multiplexing, display systems that embedded cathode connections in the display element itself, and the introduction of integrated circuits all contributed significantly to the reduction of the number of soldered connections to make a calculator, drastically increasing reliability and in most cases, longevity.

In the case of vacuum-fluorescent display tubes, eventually the individual tubes for each digit were combined into a single glass envelope with multiple digits inside, again tying the cathodes all together and using multiplexing to drive the display In the end, planar multi-digit vacuum-fluorescent displays were developed, reducing the depth requirement of the display element.  These planar type vacuum-fluorescent display devices are still used today, and found in things like microwave oven displays, displays for audio equipment, and office-oriented AC-powered desktop calculators where the readability of the display versus liquid-crystal displays is a concern, with VF tube displays being much more readable in office lighting conditions.  There are even multi-color vacuum-fluorescent display panels, with different phosphor materials deposited on various cathodes to create colors such as red, orange, and green-blue, along with the usual light-blue color.  Some vacuum-fluorescent display panels have a large number of individual dots of phosphor that are individually addressable (by rows and columns refreshed rapidly), such that simple monochrome graphics and arbitrary fonts and figures can be displayed.  For a time before Liquid-crystal (LCD) flat panel displays were invented, a lot of research went into miniaturizing these dot-matrix vacuum-fluorescent display elements. The goal was to make the dot density high enough, the refresh rates fast enough, and through the use of red, green, and blue phosphor dots, to create a color flat-panel television display.  This TV display technology was abandoned once liquid crystal display technology rapidly advanced to allow flat LCD panels to be used as television displays, as well as computer monitors, smart phone displays, tablet screens, laptop displays, displays on kitchen appliances, and graphical-display calculators.

Just as a note, there are a couple of other display technologies worthy of mention.  One was the LED, or light-emitting diode display in calculators.  These were segmented (usually seven) displays that emitted a bright red color for the segments. These were used in some battery-powered handheld calculators for a time because they did not require higher voltages like gas-discharge/Nixie tubes and vacuum-fluorescent displays, but they were also somewhat power-hungry, which limited the size of the displayed digits (usually requiring a bubble-shaped lens over the digit to magnify it somewhat to make it more readable) and affected the runtime on battery power.  An LED display was famously used in the Hewlett Packard HP-35, the first scientific handheld battery-powered calculator, and many follow-on calculators from Hewlett Packard as well as Texas Instruments and countless others in the mid-to-late 1970's.   The vivid bright-red color of the display, with perhaps a red filter over it to provide better contrast, is the giveaway for a LED display on a calculator.  No other display technology used in calculators has this distinctive color and intensity.  Gas-discharge displays all created an orange-red color, much different from that of a LED, and even with a red filter, the orange tint of the Neon gas in the gas-discharge display created a color easily distinguishable from an LED display.   LED displays were eventually phased out of use in calculators in favor of liquid-crystal (LCD) displays.  Many people confuse LED and LCD displays, much like the confusion of Nixie tubes versus other types of displays (including vacuum-fluorescent) though the technologies and timeframes involved are vastly different.

A calculator display technology that was used on some notable electronic calculators was the CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) display.  This was a tube similar to that in and old black ad white CRT television set, but much smaller, and used green phosphor instead  of white.   The digits were "drawn" using line segments to create a rendition of the green or blue-green numerals on the screen of the tube.  Arguably most historically, the Friden EC-130 used a CRT display.  Perhaps more recognizably, the legendary Hewlett Packard HP 9100A/B scientific programmable desktop scientific calculators also used a beautiful CRT display. 

A very short-lived display technology used in early electronic calculators made by the Japanese calculator manufacturer Canon, used tiny incandescent lamps (with a glowing hot filament, as did the light bulbs we used before compact-fluorescent and LED light bulbs came about) to edge-light  thin panels of clear plastic, engraved with a multitude of small dots in the shape of a numeral, with the panels stacked atop one-another, creating a stack of the numerals and a decimal point, all enclosed in a metal enclosure to create a single digit unit.  These displays had a whitish-yellow color to the digits that had a natural shape like the digits in a Nixie tube.  There was a separate lamp for each numeral and the decimal point inside each display unit.  Lighting one and only one numeral lamp in a display unit would result in the selected numeral (and possibly a decimal point) lighting up, showing through the transparent plastic panels in front of it that were not lit. While these numerals were formed like a NIxie tube numeral, they were most definitely not a Nixie tube, with the giveaway being its whitish-yellow color.  Examples of the use of this type of display in calculators are the Canon 130 (Canon's first electronic calculator), the Canon 161 and 130S, along with a couple of other Canon models.  This display technology was very difficult to multiplex, requiring individual digit decoding/drive circuit for each digit, as well as the tiny lamps burning out over time, leading to digits that wouldn't light up - definitely a problem on a calculator.   The tiny lamps were not intended to be individually replaced, requiring the replacement of the entire digit module, which, unless under warranty, was both labor-intensive, and expensive.   This led to Canon switching over to Nixie tubes in later calculators, once the patent fuss with Burroughs over Japanese copies of Burroughs' Nixie tubes settled down.  Canon was quite concerned over possible legal troubles of using Japanese-made copies of Nixie tubes, which is why they used this unique display technology in their earliest calculators.

There was definitely a lot of change in display technologies over the years, with LCD and Vacuum-Fluorescent panels being the only that remain in current calculators.  There type of displays are far different in every aspect than the displays used in early calculators, including the Sanyo ICC-82 that used either small Nixie tubes (mainly only sold within the Japanese market) and the other that came a bit later which used the seven-segment  gas-discharge tubes.

Again, sorry for the length, but I wanted to be thorough.

All the best to all,

-Rick

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