DigiKey
electronic component distributor
DigiKey (formerly written as Digi-Key) is an American electronic components distributor. The company was founded in 1972 by Ronald Stordahl. As of 2013, DigiKey is the fourth largest electronic component distributor in North America and the fifth largest electronic component distributor overall. Stordahl privately owns the company.
The name "Digi-Key" is a reference to the "Digi-Keyer Kit", a digital-electronic keyer kit that Stordahl developed and marketed to amateur radio enthusiasts. Electrical schematics for the electronic keyer were published in April 1968 by the radio publication QST. The part numbers, or SKUs, of its components typically end with "-ND".
History
After earning a degree in electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota, Ronald Stordahl returned to his hometown of Thief River Falls, Minnesota, where he took up ham radio in the early 1970s. Stordahl created a kit of electronic parts to improve the transmission of Morse code over his radio. It was a keyer designed to generate time-uniform Morse code. He soon began selling kits to other ham operators.
The public source identifies “DigiKey” as electronic component distributor. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around DigiKey, electronic and component.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1224626. 1 of 6 selected statements include explicit references; 5 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1972, 2013 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “DigiKey” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.