no more Digikey catalogs

It happens pretty fast for me. I just tried a random page

and it's ~240kB. Yeah, that's insane on a certain level, but it's also less than a second to download with the (8Mbps) Internet connection here.

I'm sure it takes them a lot of time just to prepare the contents of the catalog, though (after all, printing is the "easy" part, right?) -- so perhaps it (the PDF version) will go away, which would be a shame.

I also meant to add... even if the entire catalog is, e.g., 50MB, so what? -- Plenty of Microsoft updates are that big, and people are used to letting their computer sit there and spend some minutes or hours downloading the thing. Even a 56kbps modem connection can achieve 15MB+/hour.

(Hey, perhaps they're just switch to sending out CD/DVD-ROMs, like many vendors used to do before Internet access was quite so ubiquitous!)

Like Mouser used to do.

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It's easy to think outside the box, when you have a cutting torch.

The full PDF Digikey catalog is 140 MB (147,056,336 bytes) and took me about eight minutes to download.

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It's easy to think outside the box, when you have a cutting torch.

Any time the Arrow rep tells us about their site, I *show* him DK's. ;-) I also have given him a list of things they have to fix before I'll even consider switching to their site. Today, our purchasing guy told us that he wants us to buy from Arrow or Avnet instead of DK. I told the boss that it means that I have to search both, which will add likely a couple of hours of work a week.

No problems. I don't see production issues, though.

Arrow and Avnet will keep your BOMs, and even tell you when something on them is going obsolete. The owner of the company has a problem letting them have that much information, though.

Try this, gets around all those sluggish web sites and it searches nearly all major distributors in one fell swoop:

[...]

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Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

"gmail" domain blocked because of excessive spam.
Use another domain or send PM.

At least now the web site won't be a mindless scan of the catalog as a graphic.

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Reply in group, but if emailing add one more
zero, and remove the last word.

The reference was in regard to the whole catalog; as a PDF based on your one-pager, that would take roughly 680Megs, no indexes.

NOT 50Megs; closer to 670Megs.

With 2800 pages?; do not believe it.

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their

Don't believe it if you want, but the pages are all there. People could mail you a copy on a CDR, you know.

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It's easy to think outside the box, when you have a cutting torch.

140 MB.

Hope This Helps! Rich

140 MB.

Hope This Helps! Rich

Then each of the pages must take a whole lot less than previously indicated..

I think that PDFs do provide a large "economy of scale" in that the compression routines only have to store a dictionary once, and they have a larger data source to begin with so that the encoding become more efficient as well.

Or something like that... I'm really just saying I've seen this before: 100 page PDF files are seldom 100x the size of a single extracted page.

At 140MB for the whole enchilada, that comes out to ~50kB/page. Still a lot, but given how many drawings they have, not too bad.

---Joel

ONLY if one has high speed internet..

Nah, that's less than 10 hours on a good 56kbps connection -- start it up a bit before you go to bed, and by the next morning, voila!, one complete DigiKey catalog.

But OK, I would expect them to offer a CD option as well.

If you are going to do it that way you definitely want an FTP transfer client that can restart from where ever it was when it dropped the line. The folk that lack high speed internet these days tend to have less than entirely reliable anti-diluvian computers and dodgy phone lines as well. Running from 10 hours continuous would exceed its MTBF.

Most of them do by snail mail. Paper catalogues have all but vanished. If only the new electronic ones had better parametric search facilities.

Regards, Martin Brown