I've been a hardware hacker since I could walk. Finding and actually obtaining any parts at all in the 80's was excruciating. Even in the bad old days of the web, datasheets and even pricelists seemed to be the locus of some very unseemly rent-seeking activity.
I can't even begin to say how awesome octopart seemed when I first discovered it. Even today, when I go looking for a part I find myself stopping and not believing how awesome this is.
datasheets and even pricelists seemed to be the locus of some very unseemly rent-seeking activity
I once made the mistake of paying $10 to subscribe to a datasheet web site because they seemed to have the full tech specs (i.e. register layouts) of an IC I was reverse engineering (see http://myhd.sourceforge.net/). It turned out to be the same marketing materials I had downloaded from the chip vendor's web site.
Octopart is like the million-dollar part spec databases that electronics manufacturers buy just to have available in their design software, but for free.
I can't even begin to say how awesome octopart seemed when I first discovered it. Even today, when I go looking for a part I find myself stopping and not believing how awesome this is.