Components Data Books

[Sean Caron]

Yes! I am totally with you; just being able to flip through the books and
peruse a broad swath of the vendor's product line, has the potential to
stir the creativity in a way that's hard to replicate with discrete PDF
datasheets for each component ... most vendors Web sites are a mess and
it's sometimes hard to get a sense for what all their products exactly are
and how they relate to one another.

Not to mention when at the bench or the keyboard, I can mark pages, flip
back and forth, dog-ear, bookmark to my heart's content without having to
wait (bench utility computer is slow) or change context out of my shell,
text editor or whatnot to fire up Acrobat Reader ... It _is_ nice to have
the ability to Google a random part number and get an ID back 99% of the
time but when I am actually working with the part, yeah, it's so nice to
have paper... When I'm doing a project, most of my schematics start out on
scraps of paper, too :O

I will try to compile a proper index of my own databook holdings and get
them on the Web here soon.

Best,

Sean


On Wed, Jun 17, 2015 at 12:19 AM, tony duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
wrote:

>
> > Mine too! I just love the old paper books versus PDFs ... and I've got a
>
> So do I. It is a lot easier to filp through a databook than through a
> collection
> of PDFs.
>
> This has 2 uses :
>
> 1) If you need to find what a house-numbered part really is, you can
> quickly
> look at possible candidates in the databooks to see if any match
>
> 2) It was a lot easier to find new components to design with using the
> paper
> books than the PDFs. I can't seem to get the hang of finding interesting
> new
> devices now.
>
> It is convenient to be able to download datasheets sure. But alas this has
> led
> to the demise of the paper databook, you simply can't buy them any more.
> Oh well...
>
> FWIW, I must have over 100 databooks here. Mostly mid 1980s - 1990, but a
> few earlier.
>
> -tony
>
>