As I approach the end of my 40-year career as CEO of National |
At the time , the tools for financial analysis were “ locked up ” and |
Instruments , I am reminded of the great progress and innovations |
too expensive for anyone without a big budget to access them . |
the test and measurement industry has witnessed since 1976 . We |
The early incarnations of spreadsheets turned this situation on its |
have gone from an industry driven by vacuum tube technology in |
head , and that is exactly what we wanted to do . We wanted to |
the era of General Radio to a time when the transistor ruled with |
make it so that any engineer or scientist could access the same |
Hewlett Packard to today , when software truly is the |
tools or platform used by the R & D teams of the leading |
instrument — a transition that NI helped shepherd . |
technology companies . It was a radically empowering view at the |
Moore ’ s law has taken us for a wild , fast ride to say the least , and |
time and , in many ways , it still is . |
just when you think it ’ s run its course , process innovations extend |
“ The Software is the Instrument ” |
into new dimensions ( literally ) and push performance even further . |
While others might have seen GPIB as a hardware play , we recognized it for what it enabled in terms of software . As the PC |
Just like the transistor , NI started from humble beginnings , but it |
industry evolved ( as well as Apple ’ s Mac , which we had a special |
has relentlessly focused on engineering great products and |
affinity for given its graphical user interface ), that GPIB cable |
empowering worldchanging innovation through our customers |
made it easy to analyze and present data in a customized way for |
and platform technology . Allow me to reminisce on what the past |
our customers ’ needs . They were no longer confined to the front |
40 years have taught me and where I see this market heading as I |
panel of an instrument and their pencils and notepads for data |
shift into the next phase of my career . |
acquisition . The opportunity to innovate then shifted to the |
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“ Do for Test and Measurement What the Spreadsheet Did for Financial Analysis ”
When Jeff Kodosky , Bill Nowlin , and I started NI in 1976 , we saw tremendous room for innovation in how engineers and scientists interacted with and built test and measurement equipment . We founded the company on the premise that there had to be a better way to serve the test and measurement needs that we , engineers and scientists , faced . We couldn ’ t buy it off the shelf but at least we wouldn ’ t have to build it from scratch .
The general purpose interface bus ( GPIB , IEEE 488 ) was our gateway . Our vision , as stated in 1983 , was to “ do for test and measurement what the spreadsheet did for financial analysis .”
Stated today , the sentence loses some of its power , but think about the early ’ 80s .
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software world , where programming languages needed instrument drivers for the connected boxes . Our strategy of writing and supporting those drivers offered a critical service that continues today as NI supports more than 10,000 drivers on the company ’ s Instrument Driver Network .
But that world still left engineers and scientists with the burden of using tools designed for computer science to perform engineering , test , and measurement tasks . Our answer was twofold : LabWindows / CVI , to offer engineering-specific tools in
ANSI C programming , and LabVIEW , a graphical programming paradigm that took the way we think about solving a problem ( in flowcharts and pictures ) and turned it into compiled code . The story was simple : acquire , analyze , and present . Do it in software tools designed for a customer ’ s use case that were easy to learn
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