Transcript of Steve Rogers: A Look Back at NI LabVIEW 1, NIWEEK 2006

[John Pasquarette] Take a trip down memory lane with a demo of LabVIEW 1. Steve?

[Steve Rogers] Who you calling dusty sonny? I’ve been working on LabVIEW since late 1985, and therefore, have been on every version that’s come out, and it’s been a great time throughout. Today we are going to just take a look as a reference point to see what LabVIEW 1 looked like. We are going to run it on this Mac Plus. This Mac Plus is a superior computer then the one we used to develop the software on. This one has an entire megabyte of memory. So this was a deluxe computer. It does have a small screen and you have to look at it through a TV camera…there is no way to connect it up. One good thing about that though, is you never had to strain your neck. You never had to move your neck to look at your computer, now days you have to look around. So we are going to launch LabVIEW 1. I’m launching LabVIEW version 1.2 because that’s the best version we have that still operates. By the way, there is going to be a LabVIEW 1 coding contest later, so pay attention to what I am doing. This is all the training you are going to get.

When you are working in LabVIEW you are building a virtual instrument, and so you start off with a front panel where you can put controls and indicators. So you can pull down the controls menu and here are all the controls you can drop. So I am going to drop a binary control, and there it is. Now in 1986, this evoked spontaneous applause. {audience clapping} Ya’ll are just very kind. {audience laughter} So there we go. I am going to option-grab a copy of that. I’m going to do a strip chart demo. That’s a kind of a classic in and of itself. Now in LabVIEW 1 a strip chart was just a style of numeric. So I am going to Apple-click on the numeric and select style and there’s the styles of numerics we can pick, like sliders and knobs, and over here is the strip chart. And say ok. And now it wants to make sure I am happy with a linear increment. Yes I am. So there we go, and we’ve turned it into a strip chart. The value is the current position of the pin, so its just a number. Now there weren’t a lot of style optimizations, or options, but there were a few. So if you Apple-click, you get a pop-up menu – that was a non-standard UI feature that we thought was cool. And guess what? People kept using it, so, we didn’t invent it, but we liked it. Now here are some of the options, we can hide the grid, show the points…not a whole lot there. Now we are going to make another copy. Ok. So there’s our panel. Let’s go to the diagram. On the diagram, you’re going to make a graphical dataflow program. And there are some functions that you can get from this menu here. They kind-of are presented to you in a series of dialogs. Let’s go through every single function in LabVIEW 1. Here are the loops. Here are the arithmetic functions and the logical functions. We’ve got the array manipulations. We’ve got how you can compare numbers. You can do some timing. You can read and write files. You can put up a dialog box; make a beep. This is for communicating with GPIB instruments via a serial port or you can talk directly to the serial port. And you can format strings, do some trigonometric functions. And you’re back…ok, that’s it. That’s everything you need to build a system or simulate a system. So I’m going to drop a while loop. This is a do-while loop, it always executes once, until the wire that goes to that icon right here becomes false. In that I am going to put my random number generator. Now in LabVIEW things drop pretty much were they want to, and then you have to put them where you want them. {audience laughter} But there is not a lot of real estate, so it can’t be too far away. {audience laughter} Now I’m putting a wait-milliseconds to make sure that the cooperative execution of the loop is good behaving. And I am going to copy that whole thing. So let’s wire it up. Dr. T was talking about a new wire. These were the original “new wires” back in 1986. And they are dataflow wires, where the value goes down wire from node to node, and you are guaranteed that ones the wire value is produced, that every destination on that wire is going to get the same value. Now once you wire things down, you can’t move them anymore. Ok? That’s a safety feature – we don’t want anything sliding around. {laughter} And we actually soldered the icons directly to the background. {clapping} So we’re ready to go and we’ll let her rip, there. And so what do you have here? You’ve got a graphical front panel. {clapping} You have an inherently parallel dataflow programming language that’s pretty complete. And you can do real projects with LabVIEW 1, and it continued. If you hadn’t been able to do anything with it we probably wouldn’t be here right now. {laughter} And a real neat idea, that was just basic to this, is the idea of a virtual instrument as a hierarchical concept. So in LabVIEW 1, even the random number generator was a virtual instrument. So I can pop-up and open its front panel and you can watch it produce random numbers. So, there you have it, that’s LabVIEW 1.

If you check by the LabVIEW Zone there is going to be some sort of opportunity for you to attempt to do some kind of coding challenge in LabVIEW. So I hope you were paying attention so you could see how to operate the thing. And one more thing, thank you for using LabVIEW because that’s what given me the opportunity, and the rest of us too, to get a chance to continue to work on it. It’s been a fantastic experience. Thanks.

[John Pasquarette] Thanks Steve.

This is a transcript of the presentation given by Steve Rogers, Chief Architect: LabVIEW, National Instruments, titled A Look Back at NI LabVIEW 1for NI WEEK 2006. A video version is available for download.

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