About Us – Digilent Blog

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.)

In a contest between robot and human…the robot won (at least this round). Breaking one of Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, our normally friendly Turbo managed to get in a hit at one of our interns last week when she was troubleshooting.

You’re probably familiar with our chipKIT Pro MX7 and MX4 by now. But how did this line of microcontrollers get its start?

A few weeks ago, we did a throwback that included the D2XL. And now we can take a look back at the original Digilab I! It’s one of the first boards we made (circa 2001), and it’s always interesting to see how far we’ve come.

In the rapidly changing world of technology, the giant computers of yore are particularly befuddling to the younger generations who weren’t around concurrently with those computers. Children were shown computers from the 1970s and reacted to them.

Today’s throwback brings us a few pictures from the first time we at Digilent presented ourselves as a company in a trade show setting, around 2007. This conference was very small — it was located in the main floor entry of the ETRL building on the WSU campus. Clint (Cole), our former president, was giving a presentation as well.

Digilent hasn’t always been located at 1300 NE Henley Court! Looking back at its old locations is so fun — getting to see where we were and how we’ve grown. Today, we’d like to show you one of our former locations, the one right before our current building. This was Digilent’s fourth location. Norm snapped these pictures on a Friday night in 2006, just after we had re-organized the main floor. This was the “combine” building — it sits above what is now one of Pullman’s fine dining establishments, Black Cypress.

As February, Black History month, draws to a close, we want to highlight the achievements of an amazing and inspiring engineer. Astronaut Robert Lee Curbeam, Jr., was born in 1952 and is the astronaut who holds the record for most space walks on a single flight.