A Lil bit of History ..

[swatts]

Morning LabVIEW History Lovers,

I was preparing for a presentation and digging around in our archives down in the SSDC crypt and managed to find something quite impactful to our LabVIEW world.

Cast your mind back to 1996 (1997 or 1998, I struggle with time)

This little system was used for calibrating 3 Density transducers, it was essentially 3 systems running asynchronously, but sharing hardware.

Jonny Conway and I were deep in our masters degree and were sharing software design concepts (Jonny had already sussed LCOD from a coupling and cohesion perspective, I was the student).

We decided to use this project to exercise our ideas and try and see if 2 different programmers could build a system with a similar design, if they had learnt similar design techniques.

LabVIEW 5 - did not have many of the things that make our lives easier like event structures, Queues, classes and we didn't know about Type Defs.. I don't think it had undo either, but I might be wrong on that... I'm sure the comments will tell me.

We put all VIs in a LLB much to consternation of the small LabVIEW world we lived in. (LabVIEW programmers mainly talked to each other via comp.lang.labview and LTR in those days!)

Anyways the main design challenge was the shared resources of the hardware and the screen. In our masters we had delved into UI design, OOP and design patterns and I had messed with Visual Basic and it appeared that queues were used everywhere, and yet there wasn't a queue mechanism in LabVIEW... so we rolled our own (it also worked as a stack).

Here it is described in our book (A Software Engineering Approach to LabVIEW)

This is where the history may be up for debate, but our book was written in 2001 and early manuscripts were sent out. One of the early reviewers was Mr Stephen Mercer, who saw us struggling and came up the far more efficient Queue primitive. (I think our book also got him thinking about OOP, but that's another story and very open to correction)

Hopefully I have told it accurately, remembering the past is not a key skill of mine.

Lots of Love