Quote - UHF, I think the white specs will go if you leave it going a little while longer, normally when I get result like that I leave it running over night. I must ask, is there a light like that in real life ?

That particular render had been run overnight.

I did read up a bit on mirrors, and I tried going with a grey (84,84,84).  That cleaned up quite a bit, but by no means all of it.  I also greyed the light on most of the other surfaces, 220,220,220.  I reduced specularity to 0 on all surfaces that seemed to sparkle.  That seemed to help a bit.  Lastly I made sure there were no (unnaturally perfect) right angles.

This cleaned things up a bit, but I'm far from perfect.  I'm thinking that I still have far too much spread between light to dark.  Part of the issue there is that the sides that are not lit, are also hard to light. So I'll play with that later this evening...

 

As for your Question... I recall lots of that stuff in the 70's.

In this case, the bulb is indeed inside the lamp, and its exterior material is translucent matt.  Here's the set I started with;

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/pmc-poor-mans-corner-/94854/