[mindslight]

No... there was a time when Maxim parts weren't really available through the major distributors. They had one of the most generous sample programs, but apart from that they seemingly wanted to draw you into some heavyweight direct sales process based around millions of parts per year. As the things I was designing were mostly aiming for quantities in the thousands, it made me not even bother considering their parts.

[Gibbon1]

I'm wondering when that was. I remember basically always being able to get parts through normal distribution.

Motorola microcontrollers on the other hand.

[mindslight]

Around 10-15 years ago. Perhaps our different experiences were due to types of parts we wanted. Eventually I just avoided looking anywhere besides Digikey because the others' parametric searches were so terrible.

(Of course these days Digikey hassles customers by pointlessly firewalling arbitrary netblocks, so maybe the convenience tides are changing)

[Gibbon1]

Makes sense, 10-15 years ago I was on walk about.

Digikey got it's opening when the mainline distributors decided that didn't want to deal with piddly little orders and imposed $250 minimums. Digikey swiped a bunch of their customers.

Now days ordering off Digikey is easy. But the cost of shipping is murder unless you want to wait a week plus for ground. Same time if you know what you want places like Allied will ship small orders for not much. And Jameco Electronics if they have it you can will call from their warehouse in Belmont.