The father of LabView

National Instruments (NI) prides itself on the way it changed the measurement and automation world for engineers. But, it took a lot of guts and brainpower according to the founder, Jeff Kodosky. LabView is a graphical control, test and measurement environment development package. It is one of the most widely used software packages for test, measurement and control in a variety of industries. LabView was first launched in 1986, but has continued to evolve and extend into targets unimaginably out of reach before for such packages, including field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), sensors, microcontrollers and other embedded devices. However, even though LabView is now NI's flagship product, it was not the first one to be created by the firm. It took nearly ten years before NI had this best-seller, the name of which is now almost synonymous with the company. This article discusses the development of NI and LabView.