LabVIEW at 20!

[smercurio_fc]

Well, I'm not as ancient in LabVIEW as Lynn, as my first experience with LabVIEW was version 2.something on a Mac. Ah, the ol' bulldozer.

[rolfk]

My first contact with LabVIEW was 2.2 and mostly 2.2.1 when I started as Application Engineer back in 1992 at NI Switzerland. It was even before LabVIEW for Windows was anything to talk about to anybody outside of NI.

My first impression with LabVIEW was immediately: "Wow, this is how programming is meant to be done!" but coming from electrical engineering with electrical schematas this was of course an easy step for me.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[Marc_A]

Well you're all seasoned veterans compared to me.  I only started a couple months back in August 2005 with version 7.1.  I had only heard about LV when I was hired at my current job.  I was given the Basics course material and a computer, and I taught myself how to get around in a week or 2.  Now I have a couple projects under my belt and I really enjoy working in LV.  There's nothing like getting paid to learn such a powerful language

[tbob]

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@Ben wrote:

The LV timeline (like the Q&R function) only support intergers!

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Now that is the funniest thing I've heard all day.  Stars for you Ben.

[tst]

I also feel very young now - 6.1 somewhere in 2003.

When I first set eyes on an LV diagram I said "wow, cool" (may be historically inaccurate). Then, it took me a couple of weeks to get acquainted with the environment.

After that, I wrote my first app - a local factory wanted an SMS alert service (which is something we had done before) for its ovens and the company making the ovens told them they can't help them. We "analyzed" the system and saw that whenever a new alert is triggered in the system it is written to a log file. I wrote a program which reads the file, recognizes the new errors, builds the proper data structure for our SMS program and sends it to that program.

Looking back at it, I'm still fairly proud of how good it looks. The UI is clean, sleek and useful, there is documentation everywhere (to the point of saying why a Visible property was used), the diagram is not very big (only a couple of screens wide) and it has a few subVIs, where possible (there wasn't a lot of code repetition, or I would have used more). The only things I don't like about it is that I wired F constants into the while loops stop conditions and that the string parsing is not very smart. Also, an event structure could have been used for the UI loop, but that is a minor detail for such an application.

[bjlv]

Hi All:
I started with LabVIEW when the Mac IIx was brand new, at least that was the computer we got to replace a dead PDP-11/40. The Fortran program to be replaced was the product of several people over several years, but not continuously. I had worked on part of the version written in C on another computer before the PDP-11. I got to rewrite the whole thing in LabVIEW 1 (black and white on a color screen) in a few weeks. About a month after I finished (Jan, 1989 I think), the LabVIEW training class was offered 2 blocks away from where I worked and not in Austin for the first time (Liz Stice instructed). My major problem with the program I wrote was too much use of the sequence structure. The program controlled a CAMAC crate of instruments through a GPIB interface. The instruments included a DIO board used to drive a stepper motor to rotate samples in an x-ray beam and modules that acquired the x-ray signals from our detectors. The data was saved into HFS format (thanks to external C code from another programmer) and reconstructed images were displayed on the Mac using NIH Image software. I don't remember if we did the image reconstuction on the Mac then, but later we could. This led to a slew of other LabVIEW programs written for other projects in the days when every new Mac required a patch to LabVIEW, since LabVIEW 1 asked the Mac what machine type it was to know how to interpret (didn't compile until 2.0) the LabVIEW into machine code. Yes, wires did break when you moved an icon on the diagram, and bulldozers showed up when memory management was going to take a little time. It was still a lot faster than compiled Fortran on a PDP-11 running interpreted on a Mac II.
BJLV

[Donald]

First used LV2.1.2 for Mac in '92 on a Powerbook 140 … last used it … oh, wait it's still ticking, but has regressed to a Mac Classic.

 

Nobody ever talked about limiting the size of the block diagram to one screen with the Mac Plus/SE/Classic.

Message Edited by Donald on 02-02-2006 08:54 PM

[chilly_charly]

2.2 in 91 or 92, on a Mac II, one year before the first release of a PC version.

I used LabVIEW to monitor a lab continuous fermentor, using a PLC (pH, temperature, flow rates...) and modbus, in replacement of Apple II based systems. Took me two months to build an hideous thing that I could reproduce now in a couple of hour (the functionnality I mean, not the uglyness !..).

LV 2.2 was a gift from NI : the local NI representative (Denis Glasse, still at NI France) just thought that I would be a good local evangelist for LV. Guess what ? He was right !

[EdDickens]

I haven't been at it that long either. I first picked up LabVIEW when it was literally dropped on my desk in late 2000 shortly after LabVIEW 6 was released. I had just started working for my current employer and was assigned to the engineering center of our largest customer working directly with their engineers.

The group I was working with had just purchased a few copies of LabVIEW and a few PXI chassis and nobody has touched any of it yet. Since I was the new guy, they dumped it on me.

I don't remember exactly what my first application was, but I think it included CAN.

Ed

[falkpl]

The evolution of labview has been a pleasure to watch.  I first used labview 4.0 in late 1997 (wow has it really been almost 10 years) but I didnt quite adopt is until version 5.0 a year later.  Now rarely a day goes buy without writing a vi.  I have been the only programmer in a group of about 10 physicists and chemists (neither of which I am) and have dont all the automation analysis and data handling for our group.  One thing I have seen over the last 8 years is that labview is not accepted as a solution, not just a novelty.  I used to get "well can you do that in C" when now colleagues are familiar with the power of labview and embrace it as a trusted solution to any problem.  I still program in other languages (c#, c, c++ . . ) but I enjoy labview the most.  I cant wait for "labview everywhere" to be realized (labview on a chip).  The next 20 years should keep our careers very interesting.

Paul