vfd on technabob...

There are certainly a ton of different ways to tell time, but this retro-modern digital clock is definitely one of the cooler designs I’ve seen in a while.

The Ice Tube clock ($70 USD) gets its brilliant blue display thanks to an old-school Russian-issued VFD (vacuum fluorescent display) tube. It’s set inside of a spiffy…

When I first spotted this dot-matrix numbers on this clock I thought it was a modern-day blue LED display. But lurking beneath the surface of this timepiece is something far more interesting.

What we actually have here is a very rare Russian relic from the early 1980s. The Elektronika-7 (Электроника-7) clock was built using vacuum…