Part of the Honeywell advertising campaign featuring sculptures made from computer parts (resistors, capacitors, transistors, diodes, etc) which lasted from 1964 to 1978. In all there were over 100 animal sculptures commissioned by computer maker Honeywell as part of a long-term advertising campaign. Two of these sculptures designed by Jack Rindner were selected for use on these playing card backs, the tiger and dragon. The cards themselves were made by Brown & Bigelow in the 1960s using its Nu Vue court designs, and featuring unique binary numbering (an octal numbering system) on the pips, in addition to the standard indices. This means if you can read binary you can tell what card it is, but can also use the standard indices. While initially they were typically distributed as a pair (Tiger & Dragon) in a clear plastic case, the case was non descript and are most frequently found in the after market as individual decks. As a result, for PCDB they are listed as individual decks. This entry for the Tiger deck features the tiger sculpture on the back and is often referred to as the Transistor Tiger, although resistors and other electrical components are more prevalent.

Learn more at – http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/honeywell-animals/ http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/honeywell_bbdo_sm.pdf http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/tcmwebpage/timeline/honeywell1985.pdf

The Computer History Mueseum has a good number of them and images of them can also be seen in their online catalog – http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/search/?s=honeywell+sculpture