LabVIEW at 20!

[Graziano]

Hi!
 
   I begun developing in LabVIEW from version 7.0...... I think I missed something!

   Anyway, I am first a CVI developer, and I can say that knowing both environments (CVI and LabVIEW) is really powerful: you can learn from each environment, and you have in mind the most straightforward way to develop applications! And sorry for LabVIEW enthusiasts, but.... I won't leave CVI for LabVIEW, but rather continue developing in both!

   Have a nice day!

graziano

[waldemar.hersacher]

I started with LV 3 or 3.1 (not sure) in 1996 right after the birth of my third child. Until then I was with LV all over the years.

It was an up and down over the years but I liked 3.1.1, 5.1.1 and 7.1.1 most (why always the x.1.1?).

[Dynamik]

Not having globals wasn't too bad, but when crossing wires suddenly broke and became the same wire, with no undo, that kinda sucked.  Hey, ever since bundle/unbundle by name, it's been gravy!

Happy B-Day LabVIEW !!!

 - and thanks for giving me a livelyhood.

Message Edited by Dynamik on 03-08-2006 03:04 AM

[Scott_Jordan]

I've been a user of LV since 1986.  I don't remember what the first version I had was, but a bundle from NI containing 1.2 came just days after whatever my original copy was came.  About a dozen blue floppy disks!  So, 1.2 or something earlier, who knows.

We ran it on Macs, of course-- 128k with some sort of RAM upgrade and a GPIB card, then the SE, then the IIci and IIcx (marvelous machines, truly the high-water mark for package design of a desktop PC).  Later, I beta tested LV 2 and got featured in an ad, with a quote right next to one from John Fluke! 

Eventually, my group beta'd version 3 for both the PC and the Mac.  Along the way, we received a patent for an automated alignment approach for lining up lasers, cavities and optical fibers-- first patent to cite a LabVIEW example, in fact.  The USPTO patent examiner initially rejected the example, saying that patent office rules required a textual description of embodiments rather than pictorial, and so we were ordered to replace the "flow chart" with the equivalent source code!  The company attorney and I had to go before the three-judge board of appeals in Washington DC to straighten that out.  In fact, the attorney was going down in flames, so I interrupted and asked if I could approach the bench, then gave a demonstration of how to build a VI on my PowerBook.  The judges got the point, and the LV code stayed in the patent.

LV 4 might well have been my favorite, with its built-in compiler and compact executables.  Sigh.  But I can't imagine life without some of the goodies in the later releases and LV FPGA. 

[altenbach]

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@Scott Jordan wrote:

LV 4 might well have been my favorite, with its built-in compiler and compact executables.  Sigh.  But I can't imagine life without some of the goodies in the later releases and LV FPGA. 

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Goodies such as "undo"? 🙂

[Scott_Jordan]

Yah, "undo", and 3D graphics, and assorted Internet capabilities (one of my production VIs has a built-in Web browser), and reference nodes, and the waveform datatype, and FPGA support, and timed loops, and flat sequences, and tab controls, and...

[scoobydoo]

Back in the early 1990's I was given a copy of Labview and told to build a system to monitor temperatures and airfows.  Now, this was in the days of DOS and floppy disks.  So I sat down with the stack of floppies and spent the better part of the day running the install program feeding my pc disk after disk.  Once they were all loaded, I typed in the command to start the program and after chugging for a while, it promptly barfed and I once  again saw my lonly c:\ prompt.  Hmmm  let's try that again ... same result.  So I called NI tech support - once they got my info they responded that yes, that version had a really bad bug that caused it to crash on startup.  So he appologized and sent me yet another box of floppy disks.  So there I was a few days later feeding disks to my PC.  Then the moment of truth, i started labview, it chugged and chugged then I got a configuration screen.  Whoohoo it didn't crash.  So, I spent the next couple of hours entering in the configuration of my hardware (You remember the days before plug and pray when you had to configure everything).  So, all that was done, time to get to business I went the the next screen and - you guessed it - puke .. c:\.   I think promptly put all the floppys back into the labview box, put the box back on the shelf, grabbed the box that contained my trusty Borland C compiler; spent the rest of the day feeding Borland floppys to my PC, and built the system from scratch.

[Odd_Modem]

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@scoobydoo wrote:
Back in the early 1990's I was given a copy of Labview and told to build a system to monitor temperatures and airfows. Now, this was in the days of DOS and floppy disks. So I sat down with the stack of floppies and spent the better part of the day running the install

[snip ]..... [snip]

I think promptly put all the floppys back into the labview box, put the box back on the shelf, grabbed the box that contained my trusty Borland C compiler; spent the rest of the day feeding Borland floppys to my PC, and built the system from scratch.

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A couple of points:

1. LabVIEW was never a DOS program.
2. Borland DOS programs don't work on modern computers because of the timer check function. LV does not have this problem.
3. I thought that MSC 5.1 was the stable one, not Borland.
4. The Borland compiler is free on the web. LabVIEW costs $2K. Money follows value.

[Scott_Jordan]

As I posted, I've been using LabVIEW from its earliest days on the Mac and even its pre-earliest days on the PC.  I've probably installed it five or six dozen times in various versions and incarnations for myself, my colleagues and my customers.  And not once did I ever see a c: prompt.  Could you be thinking of LabWindows?  ...Not that I ever had such an installation issue with that software, but it was (originally) a DOS program distributed on floppies, so a crash might put you back out into the c: prompt.

Please wrack your memory about this... it's driving me nuts trying to think of a way that LabVIEW or its installer could give you a c: prompt!

[Scott_Jordan]

Hm, another thing: the manual entry of configuration stuff also sounds more like early LabWindows than any version of LabVIEW.

BTW, my "native language" when I discovered LabVIEW in 1986 was Turbo Pascal.  Damn near wore out my semicolon key with that...