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Wow, I forgot about these. And the smell of warm tube electronics in a wooden housing.

>Magic eye tubes were used as the recording level indicator for tape recorders

Pretty sure that's where I saw them, in old reel-to-reel tape decks.

Old radios too [1]. A few years back there was an intense discussion on some antiquarian site about what the function was for a central hole in an otherwise beautiful antique wooden philco radio cabinet. Finally some bright old duffer shows up and allows: "Oh, that's where the 'magic eye' went". Of course, the rest thought he was just pulling their legs about there being a "magic eye" on these things.

[1] https://mikesradiosandstuff.weebly.com/uploads/1/0/8/7/10875...

In the early 90's I scavenged a broken reel-to-reel tape recorder from a neighbor's trash. It had a magic eye tube that still functioned. I ended up disabling the tape portion and hooking it up to a cassette deck to play music thru it and watch the magic eye tube. At one point I stuck it in a dark room w/ my parents' camcorder pointed at it in macro mode and recorded some of its pulsing and winking to use in videos that I cut together.

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