LabVIEW at 20!

[Odd_Modem]

---

@Scott Jordan wrote:

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!

---

Gee, I guess I don't know the history too well. So LabVIEW was a DOS program? What version was this? I thought the earliest LabVIEWs were MacIntosh, and when Windows finally came out, there was a port to it. If it was a DOS program then they would have to write their own drawing GUI. Way back when, all the cool GUI programs were on the Mac.

[scoobydoo]

It could have been labwindows - it was lab-something-or-other, but I know I was running it on DOS. It also could have been Borland Pascal instead of C. I've drank alot of scotch since then, so the details are fuzzy.

Geez, you guys sure know how to throw a wrench into a story. I didn't think it was that important - just thought it was mildly amusing.

[Scott_Jordan]

No, sorry, I must have been unclear.

LabVIEW was originally all-Mac.  It was then ported to Windows 3.1, IIRC, in its own version 3. 

Never DOS.  Never!

LabWindows was the DOS thing.  It was originally a menued shell for a subset of C and QuickBASIC.  In later years the QuickBASIC half got jettisoned and the full ANSI C (or something very close to it) was supported.

Tidbit: I seem to recall a story, perhaps an urband legend, that Microsoft had to come to some sort of legal accommodation with NI for the use of the tradename "Windows", since LabWindows was an established product long before Windows was a gleam in Bill Gates' larcenous little eyes. 

Anyway, LabWindows was a DOS program, had nothing to do with Windows, and LabVIEW never had anything to do with DOS, and I don't see how a LabVIEW malfunction (or an installer malfunction) could've gotten anyone to a c: prompt... might be possible (when it comes to software malfunctions on PCs, nothing would surprise me!), but I've flogged eight generations of LabVIEW including several betas, on both PCs and Macs, and never saw such a result. 

[Odd_Modem]

I think it might mean having to enter stuff like IRQ, mem addr space and DMA channel. This task is pretty common on ISA GPIB cards. I recall from the past a room full of computers with all their relevant information scribbled onto the cases with a Sharpie. I think your LabVIEW 6.1 disk is the last to support this type of hardware. I happen to have one of the slowest computers capable of running Windows. It is a 16MHz 386SX. It runs DOS quite well. Once, I tried to run NT on a 486. it would work for about 10 minutes and then crash. Kind of like time-of-flight.

[Scott_Jordan]

---

Geez, you guys sure know how to throw a wrench into a story. I didn't think it was that important - just thought it was mildly amusing.

---

You gotta understand, LabVIEW isn't software, it's almost a religion!

...Hm, in fact, my code sometimes looks remarkably like the Flying Spaghetti Monster... coincidence?  I think not!

[scoobydoo]

---

@Scott Jordan wrote:

---

Geez, you guys sure know how to throw a wrench into a story. I didn't think it was that important - just thought it was mildly amusing.

---

You gotta understand, LabVIEW isn't software, it's almost a religion!

...Hm, in fact, my code sometimes looks remarkably like the Flying Spaghetti Monster... coincidence?  I think not!

---

Wow, I didn't know you guys were so attached. I, personally am not a labview programmer. I have learned enough about labview to read the "code" that EEs and MEs have written when building a prototype, to gather requirements so I can design production systems.

I was just lurking around here while waiting for an answer in the DDK forum.

[LV_Pro]

Have to throw my comments in here!

"LabVIEW was originally all-Mac.  It was then ported to Windows 3.1, IIRC, in its own version 3"       Almost correct. The first available PC version was released in the fall of '92 and was version 2.5. It was followed almost immediately by the bug fixes 2.5.1 and 2.5.2. I have the original pretty blue floppies. In those days you told NI which of their existing instruments drivers you also wanted and they sent them on floppies as well. You could, if you had internet access, which was pretty rare (not World Wide Web yet), ftp files from NI, either their custom bug patch to fix a problem you had reported, or to download additional drivers, etc. Their support was pretty great, not very many NI folks yet, smaller company and you knew a lot of them by name after a few calls for support. And you did call for support! 2.5.2 crashed regularly with the infamous, and now much rarer "Insane Error" which we decided meant that it would drive you quickly insane. It seemed to happen most often after a couple of hours of really intense coding, where you hadn't stopped to save your file! Life was exciting then!

P.M.

[rolfk]

---

@Scott Jordan wrote:

Tidbit: I seem to recall a story, perhaps an urband legend, that Microsoft had to come to some sort of legal accommodation with NI for the use of the tradename "Windows", since LabWindows was an established product long before Windows was a gleam in Bill Gates' larcenous little eyes.

---

It's not an urban legend. Microsoft got NI to agree to a software license deal where NI would get for a very substantial amount of money all kinds of MS software including Windows, Office. etc. in exchange for NI not trying to shutdown Windows as a name. As far as I know that never really was their intentions anyhow, and the whole story might have been in fact rolled up by MS trying to get NI to not use LabWindows as product name anymore.

And in hindsight it was maybe the smartest move MS could have done in respect to NI. It certainly put lots and lots of MS software into a company that was at that time still heavily Mac operated. This might as well have been one of the reasons Mac support has played a rather small role in the last few years at NI.

Rolf Kalbermatter

[DavidBoyd]

Looks like I'm arriving unfashionably late to this party of reminiscences.

I first saw a demo copy of LV for Windows, and I forget whether it was 2.5.2 or 3, probably in '93.  At the time, I was hip-deep in a coding project for monitoring a roomful of anesthesia machines undergoing a run-in test.  I was using MSC6 under DOS, and had created my own simple GUI in "graphics mode" (anybody else remember doing this.. changing the display mode from text to graphics on a PC?).  It took me forever to finish that project (though I did, and it worked), after I found a freeware task manager called CTask which allowed me to structure the code in such a way that I could manage all the time-critical bits.

Anyway, back to the LV demo.  A couple of us looked at the demo and said something along the lines of, "Nah..... that's a toy!  We're REAL programmers here, we write complicated apps in C that you couldn't possibly do with that stuff!"

Sigh.  If only, if only...

Fast forward a couple of jobs later, in '97.  I got dropped into a position where they'd paid for the three-day Basics I class (the guy I replaced had left in the meantime, and the LV4.1 box was still sitting unopened on his/my desk).  So, I got the training, had a worthwhile project to dig into (I had some consulting help, thank goodness), and never looked back.

That was at L-3 in Camden, NJ.  I moved south about a year later, bringing my "vast LV experience "  to Respironics, and have been enjoying each new release ever since.

Dave

Message Edited by David Boyd on 03-31-2006 06:24 PM

[Ben]

"

 (anybody else remember doing this.. changing the display mode from text to graphics on a PC?).

"

....back when changing it to graphics mode gave you up to 16 colors,

 with any 4 at one time

and the mouse driver was often commented out of autoexec.bat because what good was a mouse anyway, it kills the cpu

and the internet is interesting but who want to spend all their time ftp'ing files

and PC had the option for two floppy drives because the OS took up one .....

Ben