I seldom have trouble getting the handful of parts that I need for demonstrations and prototypes. My clients are the ones who have to deal with distributors. That's where the problems begin and end.

For one-of-a-kind jobs, I use what's readily available and possibly on hand.

We have some large manufacturers here in the Colorado front-range area. Seagate, Maxtor, IBM, StorageTek, among others, all do various things here. I once sold my wire-wrap cards to Dysan, the media mfg. There are telecom equipment makers, and lots of others doing volume production.

My clients tend to be smaller, i.e. buying in lots of 1K pieces per year rather than 10K pieces per week. I've had some of 'em die off because distributors would rather kick up the weekly order for one of the big guys by the annual order for my client, and, in fact, it's happened more than once. I know, I know, it's just that the salesman wanted to send his daughter to that nice finishing school outside Paris, rather than some party school here ... but, gee, it didn't occur to him that he'd put thirty guys out of work and bankrupt the inverstors in the small company.

Another problem is that, if you let distributor rep's into your facility, there's no way to guess what they take with them, whether it's conclusions about your business, usually incorrect, or technology they can bandy about to impress their friends. I'd not fear they'd steal technology, because it takes several of them in a room to have a total of three grey-cells to rub together. They're good a chatting things about, though, and they're good a backslapping and backstabbing.

They happily advise on matters they totally fail to understand, recommend products that take your time to discover they're totally inappropriate, fail to give you information you need, but supply you with plenty that's either wrong or inapplicable.

I really don't like to deal with most distributors.

Digikey is OK, for handfuls, and they'll mail USPS, which gets the product to you in three days for $1 rather than $6.95 in 5-7 days with UPS, and USPS doesn't charge extra for Saturday delivery.

Mouser is a mite difficult to browse, unless you already know the secret handshake, i.e. the definition of the products listed on their site. The catalog helps a bit, but it's not perfect yet either.

Both of the above are pretty easy for small purchasers like me, though.

If I'm trying something new, however, I generally get samples. Maxim is not the least bit difficult with their sample policy, and you can order small quantities with your credit card.

If I have trouble getting parts, I use something else. If only one part will work, and I have supply problems, then I reconsider my design.

RE