![]() Update 5/21/11: Here is the Digi-Key press release, “ Digi-Key Drops Printed Catalog and Redefines Itself as The Leading Totally Integrated Internet-Based Global Distributor“ Author Stephen Trier Posted on Categories Everything Else Tags business, Digi-Key, Mouser, vendor I’m glad I’ve known you over these years. Farewell, old friend of the thin newsprint and satisfying “thunk”. I bought my first National Semiconductor databooks from the pages of the Digi-Key catalog. Mouser’s search engine is just a little bit better, and if search engines are all we have, that little bit will give them an edge. The change may lead me to buy more from Mouser. There is surely a cost to creating the catalog, though it is surely less than the printing and postage costs. Are EDN and Electronic Design still printing on paper, or have they gone all-electronic, too?Ī compromise would be an e-book version of the catalog, which is already available as a 140 Megabyte PDF! I wonder if that will go extinct, too. Lately I’ve just been scanning their RSS feeds. How am I to know about a cool new component if I don’t know I should search for it in their database? Maybe I’ll have to start getting the trade magazines for the advertisements. I hope Digi-Key looks for ways to provide that serendipity in a search-engine world. Over the following years, memories of what I saw will percolate up when I’m looking for a solution to a problem. I mostly skip over the boring lists of part numbers, but I pay attention to the detailed descriptions of FPGAs, processors, development boards, tools, passive components, optoelectronics, and more. Every five years or so, I read the catalog cover-to-cover. I also learned a lot from the catalog, since when I started receiving it, I was just a kid who didn’t know there were resistor types beyond what Radio Shack sold. More than once I went looking for one thing and spotted something else interesting and useful. I will miss the serendipitous discovery that the printed catalog made possible. Today, it serves only as Digi-Key’s signature, which is ironic given its origins as an exceptional case. Later, Digi-Key started listing price breaks for intermediate quantities (10, 25, 100, etc.), and as that practice spread through the catalog, the “-ND” suffix became ubiquitous. Full reels of parts and certain expensive items had an “-ND” on their part number to mark them as exempt from the discount, but anything without the “-ND” was fair game. Prominently displayed on the catalog front cover was a schedule of discount percentages, with better discounts for larger orders. In those days, the “-ND” suffix meant No Discount. (At one point, I wondered if National was Japanese, too!) The only US semiconductor manufacturer they carried was National Semiconductor, though they distributed several lines of Japanese semiconductors. ![]() They had a good optoelectronics section, which remains one of their strengths. Back then, it was thin, only 32 or 64 pages long. I received my first Digi-Key catalog in 1983. Nevertheless, I will miss the giant catalog that has always had a prominent place in my office and home lab. The warning signs were certainly there, as Digi-Key sent thinner and less frequent catalogs to hobbyists than to professionals, then cut back to annual issues. Digi-Key are also cancelling their TechZone magazine. Nowadays they still print a catalog, but it is about as chaotic as their website - which is still one of the better ones.The May 2011 High Frequency Electronics arrived with the sad news that the most recent Digi-Key catalog is the last, replaced by the web site. They contained very detailed specs, pinouts of all digital logic chips (74xx and 40xx), many controllers, transistor comparisons etc. At Uppsala university we tend to keep paper copies of the local distributor Elfa's catalogs from a few years back as resources in our labs. Every Chinese seller on eBay has a more structured approach. Actually you can sort these by "product title", price (not a piece, but total price) and manufacturer. If you find the section on through-the-hole LEDs for example you are presented by 5 pages of products, 102 items per page, which are not sorted by color, diameter, intensity, manufacturer or anything. Here there is absolutely no sorting, whatsoever. A perfect example how not to make a web catalog is the Swedish branch of Conrad ( ). On a web site you can implement (and many try to) parametric searches and tables - but these simply su** most of the time. chips or transistors by their part number. For example: in a paper catalog all items are sorted just by one category, e.g. It shouldn't be too difficult to make a good web catalog, but many companies simply don't manage. I completely agree - at least for most companies.
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