National Instruments (Austin, TX) reached two milestones this year: 30 years as a company and 20 years of supplying its industrystandard measurement software, LabVIEW. Microwaves & RF spoke recently with Dr. James Truchard, president, CEO, and co-founder of National Instruments (www.ni.com) about his beginnings with the company and where measurement technology was heading in the next few years.

MRF: It has been 30 years since beginning National Instruments and 20 years since the introduction of LabVIEW. What were the early days like?

Truchard: I'd like to talk a little bit about what it was like before we started the company. I was working at the University of Texas; I had gotten my Ph.D. in 1974. I'd been work full time primarily on projects for the US Navy. We were building computer-based test systems; in hindsight, we could call these" Virtual Instrumentation" systems. The last one had three PDP11s running UNIX and had to be operated by shipyard mechanics. So it was pretty extreme at both ends. We used digitizers and software to build the instrumentation. So this really established an idea that we would bring forward for using ever more powerful computers to build instrumentation systems.

MRF: Do you remember the performance of the digitizers?

Truchard: These were state-of-the-art digitizers at that time. These were 2-MHz, 12-b analogtodigital converters (ADCs) that took about 35 W power and cost us around $5000 a piece. Now you could get the equivalent capability for a few dollars.It was the most advanced system at that time. And it really inspired us to see what could be done with computers. In starting the company, we really took a step backwards from those kinds of systems to simpler applications, simply interfacing instruments to computers. A new standard had come out in 1975. So in starting the company in 1976 we embraced the standard because we had seen how difficult it was to connect instruments to computers. The first one we did took two man-years of effort just to talk to the instrument. It was a very complex interface that needed a custom board design and custom software to make it work. So we appreciated the need and the utility of having a standardized interface that was the IEEE 488 as our starting point. And it was a good starting point because it was right between computers and instruments. What better place to be if you wanted to revolutionize instrumentation?

So we moonlighted to start those first interfaces starting in 1976 and by 1979 we were actually a profitable company, self-financing the company with very little money. That proved to be good business. From that point, we went full time and started thinking of the bigger picture, the application. We had seen how successful spreadsheets had become for solving the problem of financial analysis on a computer. Before having a spreadsheet, it might have taken you six months to right a program where the columns lined up just right. With a spreadsheet, you could do it in minutes. So we hoped to do a similar thing in developing LabVIEW.

Starting in the early 1980s, [ cofounder] Jeff [Kodosky] and I worked to find an answer. I wanted this solution that did what the spreadsheet did; Jeff wanted to invent a programming language. We both got our way with LabVIEW. It was introduced in 1986 and really was revolutionary for its time. No one had really made a practical, graphical programming language with data flow like we did with LabVIEW. And it turned out to be a very good model approach for instrumentation. Typically, we had observed when we started doing measurements in our previous applications; we would start with a block diagram. That was the natural language for engineers to communicate with each other. And, obviously, instruments had front panels. So, if you could combine those two elements to create an application development environment, you could really make a much better and more user-friendly programming environmentfor instrumentation. So Jeff did that. To this day, no one has found a better way to solve that problem than we did with LabVIEW.

MRF: What were people using before that time?

Truchard: They were basically using the functionality of the instruments that the vendor defined and use the simple calculators at the time to capture results or generate a plot. It was very simple use of the instrumentation that didn't really provide advanced analysis. With LabVIEW, you have your choice. You can either control traditional instruments, or you could build your own instruments with user-defined functionality. And I had worked previously in the area of sonar where there weren't any offthe-shelf instruments to do our work. That's why we had to build these dedicated digitized instruments. So we saw a need for broad use of instrumentation that could be defined by the customer rather than have it packaged in the manner of traditional instruments.