I guess I don't buy enough any more. I'm feeling left out. They also changed my customer number a few years ago, but I have had the same mailing address for 36 years, and have bought from them longer than that.
They started out as a magazine add you ripped out and checked off the boxes of what you wanted!
I remember ordering from a small catalog that had about 10 pages of mostly surplus TTL chips when we built home computers in the mid 70's. They gave the catalogs out at the local computer shop that was DIY friendly (don't remember the name). It was not the Byte Shop, they just wanted to sell me an Apple 1 computer. I ordered a SWTPC 6800 kit from the other shop in the mid 70's and designed expansion boards for it. My first kit company was DMA engineering, making SS-50 bus memory and video boards. I remember the Digikey ads in Kilobaud Microcomputing magazine, but don't remember the check boxes. JDR Microdevices did have tear out pages, and Jameco had Jim Paks of parts in the computer store. Allied has been around since I was a kid, but almost dissapeared when Radio Shack took over. Lafayette and Olson (I worked there) have been long gone.
I thought this was the beginnings of Digikey, but I met an old guy at a hamfest that had one of the original Digikey products. It was an electronics kit with a simple single sided PC board and about 5 TTL chips. It was a DIGItal KEYer for a ham radio rig, hence the company name.
It used digital chips to establish the dot to dash ratio in Morse code transmission, which made for easier reception at the other end, and allowed for automatic "paddle" keying. Previous paddles were mechanical.
