Did you know LabVIEW turns 25 this year?

[jaking]

What’s the earliest version you used and what were you creating?

Jennifer King

NI Content Coordinator

[PhillipBrooks]

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@jaking wrote:

What’s the earliest version you used and what were you creating?

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LabVIEW 5.1 - created an ADO library for use with TestStand 1.0.

[Darren]

LabVIEW 5.0.1 in January 1999...I was recreating my favorite card game, SET, during Basics 1 training as an AE.

[Mark_Yedinak]

LabVIEW 4.0 back in early 1997. I was creating an automated test system for testing telephone service over cable. I still rememeber installing it from floppy disks.

[altenbach]

LabVIEW 4.0 to control an old Varian EPR spectrometer, replacing a Nicolet 1280 minicomputer with a PC based solution.

Even today, that same LabVIEW 4.0 executable still runs on the same old 120MHz Pentium daily. The only mantenance over the last 15 years was replacing power supply and CPU fans. Long ago, I switched the small CPU fan with a large power supply fan for better reliability and less noise and it hasn't failed since.

Earlier this year, the 1.2GB HD started getting bad blocks so I copied everything over to an identical HD with less mileage and things are still ticking along. 😄

[johnsold]

LV 1.2 in 1989 on a Mac Plus (or maybe an SE).  We called it the Acoustic Startle System.  The purpose was to test the effects of chemicals on neuromuscular development in fetal rats.  The system consisted of tone and noise generators with adjustable frequency and amplitude, load cells under the animal cages, sound attenuating enclosures, and the LabVIEW program.  The program had a 27-frame stacked sequence structure (the only type available in LV 1.2)  The AI, DO, and function generators were MacADIOS devices connected via the SCSI port.

In operation it produced a tone followed by a noise burst.  The noise burst was generated at maximum amplitude.  Like someone sneaking up behind you and making a loud noise, this evokes a startle response: the animal jumps.  If the animal heard the tone first, it did not jump as much.  By varying amplitude and frequency of the tone and measuring the strength of the "jumps" we could determine the hearing sensitivity of the animals.  Chemical exposure which produced neuro-muscular damage could be detected at much younger age and more reliably than the previous method which required waiting until the animals died of old age and then hope that tissue analysis could detect the damage.

A few years later I got to rewrite the program when one of the researchers moved to a different university and asked me to build a system for him.

Not long after that another researcher asked for a variation on the program to assist in his study of brain function related to the learning process.  The revised system (written in LV 5 and upgraded to LV 6) generates audio tones followed by an airpuff or water spurt stimulus.  The response is an EEG signal measured on electrodes implanted in the rabbits' brains.  This program uses parallel loops, state machines, and no stacked sequence structures. It is running on a Mac II with LabNB DAq cards.  At least one spare computer and DAQ card are in storage.  It was last modified in 1998-9 to include conditional triggering based on signal patterns observed in the EEG data.  Research facilitated by this program has resulted in several Ph.D.s and publications. It is still being used regularly.

I am in discussion with the professor about rewriting this again in LV 2011 to add features, use modern DAQ and computers, and to eliminate a couple of bugs we recently discovered.

Lynn

[rpursley8]

I found some code I wrote to control an old SA2012 antenna positioner (Scientific Atlanta), LabVIEW 4.02

[Dennis_Knutson]

The first version I used for which I charged a customer was 3.0. I had been using LabWindows (no CVI) and VB and the brand new NI Sales Engineer asked if I would like to start developing with LabVIEW.

[LV_Pro]

1992-1993 version(s) 2.5/ 2.5.2, first release on Windows (Windows 3.0). Everything on the blue 3.5" floppies (still have them and the original book that came with it). Automated test system for testing electronic modules for an underwater sonar test range, to be deployed at a depth of around 1100ft (340m). Lots of sequence structures and other early day "mistakes" of a text based programmer going to LabVIEW. Of course the examples showed these "techniques", as even the originators hadn't fully grasped many of the subtlties of LabVIEW. Then again, those early versions didn't have a lot of the features we take for granted. It also crashed, a lot! "Insane Error" I think it meant that after the fifth of the day you would be closed to insanity.

[smercurio_fc]

LabVIEW 2.2 (or was that 2.1?) on a Mac. I was in grad school at the time, and I was implementing a non-linear controller for an inverted magnetic levitation system (magnet on top - inherently unstable system) as part of my thesis. Not as spiffy as it may sound - all that LabVIEW was doing was just some calculations.