When and how did Digitrax form and established? I have Googled this before but couldn’t find any information. Myabbe I didn’t look hard enough. I’m gonna look again.
Early 90’s - AJ Ireland develops the Loconet architecture. He and Zana create Digitrax, and I first met them at the 1994 Portland NMRA convention. They have been around almost as long as Lenz(inventor of the basic DCC we now know).
Jim
Here is a snippet from the Digitrsx web site
"Like any good electronics engineer, A. J. Ireland could not leave well enough alone. After playing for days with another manufacturer’s command control system, A. J. knew that he could do things better. The power drill came out and the interior of the old command control system soon was exposed to his skillful eyes. Of course, the warranty was voided, but it was the first move toward modern command control.
We look back on those systems with a degree of nostalgia. They weren’t as bad as Pong, but they certainly were better than anything that had come before. The first 100 Challengers were built in the Ireland home, then packed up and taken to a model railroad convention at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Those first units sold out at the show, and orders were placed for hundreds more and Digitrax suddenly needed employees.
Many of these early systems are still in service, doing what they were intended to do, bringing happiness to model railroads."
found at http://kb.digitrax.com/index.php?a=704
It then says about the Challenger
“Challenger was Digitrax’s first commercially produced system. It was manufactured from 1993 to 1998.”
Interesting stuff.
How about NCE?
How and when did they get started?
Rich
Your DCC questions might be better servered over on the “DCC and electronics” forum here:
http://cs.trains.com/TRCCS/forums/744.aspx
[8-|]
That is a very interesting bit history you posted Simon. I see the forum police are out, lolol.