Working with the Digilent Forum

As most of you know, we have our own Forum where anybody can go post questions and projects involving Digilent products: FPGAs, microcontrollers, any of our scopes, National Instruments products like the LabVIEW Home Bundle, Pmods, programming solutions, you name it. With this wide variety of products and an even wider variety of potential questions, the Forum can be a little daunting to navigate. This post will help first-time Digilent Forum users get the best experience out of the Digilent Forum.

Throwback Thursday: Digilent’s Beginnings, Gene Apperson’s Story

Upon his retirement from Microsoft in 1998, Gene Apperson and his family relocated to Pullman, Washington. After a few years, Gene decided to go back to school as an undergraduate in mechanical engineering. A professor, Bob Richards, soon asked Gene to switch to the Master’s program, even though most of his background was in electrical engineering. He ended up taking a VLSI design class from none other than Clint Cole. While Gene ended up asking Clint whether he would be able to do well in the class, they got to talking and decided to start a company together.

Throwback Thursday: Early Digilent Packaging

When Norm MacDonald started working full-time for Digilent back in 2005 – 2006, most of our products were sold in very basic packaging (think anti-static bags and plain white boxes). Totally understandable for a starting company. A few boards were given a bit of branding, though. The Basys and Nexys, of course. These were the simple boxes those came in at the time. (They may have been done by Clint or Jim or some combination of the two.)