Préface à la 4^e édition

LabVIEW will be 29 years old this autumn, and when I reflect on its history, I am gratified by the success it has enjoyed, bemused by how much of my life I have invested in its development, and sobered at the realization that a number of the original ideas are still being worked on. Granted, these were the more far out and fuzzier ideas, but the fact that it has taken more than 15 years to reach the point where we can begin exploring them seriously, inevitably makes me wonder about how much time is left because, after all, I am a grandfather now. On the other hand, to be back in an inventing mode, with the possibility of making another advance as significant as LabVIEW 1 was in its day, is exhilarating. Well, perhaps that can be the topic of a future foreword. For now, let me briefly describe how we have gotten to where we are today.
In 1983, National Instruments was a small company making GPIB interfaces and driver software for a variety of mini and microcomputers and operating systems, but we were growing faster than the market and it was clear that we had to do something more if we were going to continue our growth rate. The logical step was to tackle the next higher level problem beyond connecting instruments to computers, namely writing the software to automate the measurement systems.
There were lots of things we could have done as evidenced by the variety of extant products based on Basic or Forth, or consisting of libraries to be used with C or Fortran, or products which were simply configurable but specialized applications…