@Vince those Minitrons are a nice looking display. I'd hope that if you don't leave it running 8hours a day that they would last a good long time...
Just sent the guy a message asking for more pics and info...
There used to be similar displays on petrol pumps. They were running continuously. Now they are all mostly LCD, of course
Corrected that for you, a small garage in Nantwich still has petrol pumps with a mix of Numitrons and the drop-in LED replacements. There will be others still using them, as smaller places can't always afford to buy newer pumps, as the big chains do often.
Some of the Gilbarco Highline boards we have here with Numitrons (in quote below), I also have a another Gilbarco board that was re-designed to take either the Numitrons, or an additional second board for Minitrons.
Numitrons had a longer existence due to being used in petrol pumps, the requirement for spares to service those still in use has probably eaten through most of the old stocks. And as I mentioned recently, there is still one garage locally running pumps with Numitrons.
The later electromechanical vane type displays also seem to have also become much less common, another local place still had some last year but they had been ripped out earlier this year, no doubt to be replaced with more LCD crap, last one I used could really benefit from more readings per second or a large hammer put through it.
Most of the Numitron & vane displays on ePay.uk seem to be pulls from old pumps, often at silly prices too.
Here are some circuits from Gilbarco Highline I pumps, these were dumped around the back of a smaller petrol station which had replaced them with newer second hand pumps with the vane displays. My brother bought some stuff from them and I asked about the boards & they were OK with me taking them away.
The owner of the garage those boards came from, mentioned they didn't work properly with a mix of LED replacements & Numitrons, but other petrol stations didn't seem to have any issues mixing them.
Can't remember where this picture was taken.
Another from a few years ago with a full set.
I've got some of those Minitrons, still attached to the display module from a petrol pump (sorry picture is crap), the very rusty PSU with RIFA's is somewhere in the shed too, wish I had kept the pulser modules as they would have been interesting to experiment with the HP reversible counter.
Still can't get to that module with the Minitrons from a uncommon (in the UK) Bennett Beck blender pump, we had a set of four of those some years ago, the worst two got scrapped and the other two sold on ePay for bugger all, they may or may not have ended up in Africa.
David