What is the difference between a nixie tube and a pixie tube?

Question

I recently purchased some nixie tubes on Ebay, which are vacuum tubes with numeric filaments (0-9) that light up depending on the pins the voltage is applied to. It's basically a crude digital display. My father knew these as pixie tubes, I was wondering: Is there a difference between the two? If so, what's the difference?

Answer 1

Your dad misremembers. You have a Nixie tube. A Pixie tube has a plate with stencil icons inscribed in it, which are lit up by electrodes behind them.

They are both gas discharge tubes however.