You can get the datasheet on the manufacturer's website the day it's published, and you can subscribe to newsletters which inform you of any new information. With the Internet databooks and printed datasheets are things of the past. The next CD-ROM isn't due before November, so you would get a leaflet (for a diode) or a book (for a microcontroller). Not good enough! Your sales engineer comes along to present a new product, and you want the datasheet, preferably by yesterday. And PDFs are searchable! Much better already. You can get your complete collection of datasheets on a couple of CD-ROMs, they're virtually free so you can have a set for each design engineer, and publish a new version twice a year. They needed updating with new products, and as a small customer you had to buy the new version every so often, or the manufacturer had to ship tens of thousands free to their big customers. Then there were the databooks from the other manufacturers, and you needed several sets, so you ended up with a library with several hundreds of databooks.īut databooks are impractical, not only because of the place they take. Very awkward if you needed the book at the bottom :-). Before the Internet era I worked at Philips Audio, and just the Philips databooks was a 2m pile. Have the audio databook on your desk and you conquer the world. Databooks were the bibles in component information. Cookbooks were more like application notes, while datasheets were more about formally documenting the manufacturers specifications.įirst there was print. They were almost always published by third parties, not the chip manufacturers themselves, and thus were mostly manufacturer agnostic. Databooks have been mostly obsoleted now, to the delight of field sales people and employees taking breaks everywhere.Ĭookbooks are entirely different. This was before the Internet was useful, and PDF's were commonplace. Around the same time, manufacturer representatives and field-sales people from distributors would drive from customer to customer with their trunk full of databooks. Around 1997 my library was made from six 6-foot bookshelves completely full of databooks- that used all the wall space in the employee break room. Sometimes manufacturers would include application notes or white papers in the databook as well.īack in "the day", engineers would have a large library of databooks. A databook is a collection of datasheets, in printed book form, from a single manufacturer.
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