Please help me identify this interesting display

Question

Hello!

I've been in vienna about a month ago and some of the older metro stations have some extremely interesting displays I've never seen anywhere before.

I've searched for them all around the internet and literally couldn't find anything about those displays!

I even wrote a email to the vienna public transport company. They forwarded me to a technician who just told me those are "segment displays"

I would be really thankful if you have some information about these displays and if you could share them with me.

Already thanks in advance!

RParkerE · Answer

I think I found it. Check this out: Ateg - Automation GmbH (I'll put the image below too) Looks as though you were correct and it is indeed an LCD!

jc2048 · Answer

The segmentation is too intricate for a flip dot. (Those characters are only a couple of inches high.) I'd say it's LCD. I can vaguely remember a job which included a couple of similar displays back in the mid 1990s. I think the ones we worked with were made by Siemens. The backlight was a tube running along behind each row of characters. The individual characters sat on an internal multidrop bus (RS422, or RS485, or something like that), so it was simple and neat inside. There was an interface board at the end which didn't have to do much other than relay the data on to the characters. At the time, Siemens was a hugh company with their own semiconductor division, so they would have been making the LCDs and semiconductors themselves. These units sold for a considerable premium above the kind of LED signage that we were making but would have cost them much less to build, so they would have been making a tidy profit on them. I don't know what my role would have been - I probably just looked at the stuff being sent to the display with a scope to give the programmers a helping hand with getting the interface to the thing working, or something like that.

shabaz · Answer

It looks really similar (but yellow instead of green) to the UK trains message signs on Network Rail up till about 5-10 years ago (they have changed them since then) and they too looked like LCD. So my guess for the one in the photo is LCD too.

Please help me identify this interesting display

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