Austin, TX. National Instruments is achieving a significant milestone, with the company celebrating its 40th anniversary and LabVIEW completing 30 years of availability. NI cofounder and business and technology fellow Jeff Kodosky said the hardware and software company has enjoyed finding innovative ways to bring technology to market, providing “…step function advances in the tools used in our industry.”
NI first achieved success as a GPIB company, he said, addressing the Wednesday NIWeek keynote audience. Then, NI had to anticipate what to focus on next. If you ask customers what they want, Kodosky said, paraphrasing Henry Ford, they’ll say “faster horses.”
Kodosky—often described as “the father of LabVIEW”—said he and his coworkers decided customers would want new approaches for instrument control. The NI team found that the arrival of the Macintosh provided a major inspiration—not just for a pretty user interface but also because engineers always start with block diagrams, which the Mac was uniquely able to display. That inspiration led to the development of LabVIEW.
A key question, Kodosky said, was, would engineers buy a Mac? The answer was mostly no. “They ignored us in droves,” he said, except for a band of early adopters.
But Kodosky and his colleagues persevered, developing a compiler for their new data-flow programming language, developing companion plugin DAQ boards, and developing a version of LabVIEW for the PC.
With LabVIEW came the concept of the virtual instrument, which, Kodosky said, resonated with engineers. LabVIEW, he said, offered reduced development time and effort while speeding hardware and software integration. LabVIEW is not without a learning curve, he said, but it’s worth the effort.
Benefits, he said, include code reuse and the preservation of investment, scalability, and parallelism. In addition, it promotes collaboration, and a community has formed around it. And LabVIEW has continued to evolve. He cited LabVIEW FPGA as a key milestone that democratized FPGA programming—allowing a LabVIEW diagram to be turned into a hardware circuit with no operating system or processor.
Kodosky said LabVIEW seems to promote what psychologists call a “flow experience.” LabVIEW, he concluded, is “fun to use.”
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