A Nixie tube is basically a neon lamp with cathodes shaped like numerals (or letters, or a few other things). Apply a voltage to the cathode and the neon around it glows. It’s not a vacuum tube–it is actually filled with neon at low pressure.
A VFD is under a vacuum, and the light comes not from a glowing gas but from a phosphor that emits light when electrons hit it. It’s similar to a cathode ray tube, except there’s no electron gun, just cathode elements that emit electrons. Since the color depends on the phosphor type, this enabled multi-color displays. Also, the cathodes can be more easily made into complicated shapes, so it works well for 7-segment displays, game graphics, etc.
Sure thing! There are lots of funny display types around and these two do both work by some kind of electron emission business, so confusion is understandable.
I had the Mattel Electronic Football game from around 1978, the play of which bore only a vague resemblance to football – it was essentially just trying to not let your LED get run into by the computer’s LEDs.
Electronic? How about electric games? When I was a young teen, my dad and I each got an electric draw poker game for Christmas. His was about 4 inches long, 5 inches high, and an inch and a half thick. It had five windows, each with a button under them, and a handle to activate it. It was supposed to resemble a slot machine. When the handle was pulled reels with card values under the little windows would spin and then stop when the button was pushed. If you wanted to, you could pull out a button and push it in again. This was the “draw” feature.
My game was smaller at 2x2x4 inches. It worked the same way, but had a button on the end instead of a slot machine handle.
I had a few Pocketeers games including a poker slot machine. They were fun way back in the day (1970s Nintendo), and some were very clever. I’d completely forgotten about those.
My family had a table hockey game also. It was quite fun. I actually liked it more than foosball, another game we had at home. A favorite of mine, though, was the table-top air hockey game we had.
I played that approximately one million times against my brother.
Years later, a kid that a friend of mine was babysitting challenged me to a game of Electronic football, not knowing I was a ringer…
Remember mechanical games like this one Blip (console) - Wikipedia (it may look electronic but the light that you were trying to hit back and forth was physical - attached to gearing, with a LED on top).
I had one of those as a kid in Germany and loved it, as did all my friends. It even had goal lights and the goalies could move through a curve to the back of the goal. The goal lights simply worked by the weight of the puck, which fell into a pit onto a metal plate that closed the circuit. That was cool the first few times, but when the batteries ran out, I never bothered to change them. It also had mechanical scoreboards.
I also had a GCE Arcade-Time Watch that was really cool, it had a little joystick and would play different games. It was fun to sneak a few game rounds in class, I think I got caught more than once and the watch confiscated until the end of the day.
We had the Star wars electronic battle command game, must have been 1980. My dad brought it back from the US and it was awesome. I can’t remember the game play other than you woukd move your ship around ona 4x4 grid and occasionally bump into someone and then have to pick a direction to shoot in.
I seem to remember the Intellivision being at a higher price point than Atari 2600s and ColecoVision consoles. Intellivision also had better graphics.
Looking at the Wikipedia article linked, I was surprised to learn that Intellivision sold as many as 3 million units (unless that was worldwide, as opposed to U.S. only). Was also surprised to read that game development for Intellivision continued until 1990 – by then, Nintendo had made early-80s game systems a distant memory.
We had this bowling game when I was a kid. If you hit a certain button just at the right time you’d get a strike every time. If I remember right your bowler character would do jumping jacks when you got so many strikes in a row.
