He is talking about a visual appearence of a large number aka thousand separator.
if we want to use small nixie tube, we get numbers with a "hundreds separator", and not thousand.
for example, it take more time to read |4|02|18|00|, than |4|021|800|,
or how much is that: |50|00|00|00|00|? 500 mil? 50 mil?
I need to count zeros, that takes idk, 4 seconds, but the same number with the thousand separators |5|000|000|000|, it tooks milliseconds to read 5 billion.
therefore, small nixie tube (1 tile height) with 3 numbers in a row, maybe 2 tile wide would be helpful.