Letter from Dr. T

As we usher in 2006, we at National Instruments are thrilled to mark two very important company-wide milestones - the 30th anniversary of our company's founding and the 20th anniversary of our flagship software product, NI LabVIEW. Both of these achievements testify to the success of virtual instrumentation - a revolutionary approach to measurement and automation applications that offers engineers and scientists a better way of creating customized, efficient solutions. As commercial technologies become more efficient and emerging technologies open up new possibilities for design, test, and measurement, virtual instruments will continue to be on the forefront of the most exciting developments and most innovative approaches to solving application challenges.

In 1986, we released the first version of National Instruments LabVIEW, a software product that challenged traditional approaches to programming with intuitive graphical development similar to flowcharting. During the past 20 years, it has been especially exciting to watch LabVIEW evolve from a desktop instrument control and data acquisition tool into an integrated design, control, and test platform for desktop, industrial, embedded and handheld applications. We recently released LabVIEW 8, which dramatically streamlines development of distributed systems development by delivering distributed intelligence - a collection of technologies that simplifies the development of processes running across applications and among remote devices.

I vividly remember the earliest days of the company, when all employees could fit into a single room for a company-wide meeting. Today, NI is home to more than 3,800 employees with operations in nearly 40 countries. We continue to strive to perpetuate the principles on which the company was founded 30 years ago: fun, challenging environment, innovation, and open communication. We recently were named among FORTUNE's Top 100 Companies to Work For for a seventh consecutive year, an award that validates the idea it is possible to create a great employee experience while building a successful business.

We are honored to see how far we have come over the past three decades, and are even more excited to imagine the possibilities of where the next years will take us. We invite you to join us in celebrating these two very special anniversaries in 2006, and we encourage you to share our memories by visiting www.ni.com/anniversary for historic photos, an interactive timeline, and more information on the NI culture and vision.

Best Regards,

James Truchard