National Instruments
More info
- Creator
- James Truchard, Jeff Kodosky, Bill Nowlin
- Released
- 1976
- Owner
- Emerson (since 2023)
- Type
- Test and measurement equipment
The Texas company that turned the PC into a lab instrument and let engineers program by drawing wires between boxes on screen.
Three researchers at the University of Texas at Austin started the company in 1976 to connect computers to laboratory instruments. The first product was a GPIB card, for the interface Hewlett-Packard had invented for its own gear. Data acquisition boards followed, letting an ordinary PC replace racks of expensive standalone equipment.
What made the name was LabVIEW, released in 1986 for the Macintosh. Programs are written in the graphical language G as dataflow diagrams: blocks for measurement, filtering and display are wired together, and data flows when inputs arrive. Test engineers love it; programmers who inherit a sprawling LabVIEW diagram rarely do. Later platforms such as CompactRIO let the same diagrams compile to an FPGA. Emerson acquired the company in 2023.