NI history

Because the trio were still employed by the University of Texas, in 1977 they hired their first full-time employee, Kim Harrison-Hosen, who handled orders, billing, and customer inquiries.

In 1978, the three moved the company to a real office at Burnet Road in Austin.

In 1980, the profits made the co-founders confident enough to leave their jobs and focus solely on company operations.

By 1983, the company had changed two offices, and in the same year, it produced its first GPIB board used to connect instruments to IBM PCs.

NI, in 1986, introduced its first flagship product, i.e., LabVIEW graphical development platform for the Macintosh computer.

In 1989, the company began issuing a quarterly newsletter, Instrumentation Newsletter, with feature articles, new product information, user-solution case studies, and new instrumentation technology to educate current and prospective customers about the company's products and technologies.

In 1990, NASA utilized a computer software program developed by the company to help trace fuel system leaks affecting space shuttle launches.

In 1991, the company achieved revenues of $59.5 million, with net income of $3 million.

By 1992, the company had exhibited approximately 40 percent growth per year for the previous 10 years and revenues jumped to nearly $83 million.

With LabVIEW now available to a much larger audience, in 1993 the company reached the milestone of $100 million in annual sales.

In 1994 the company was reincorporated in Delaware.

The company went public in March 1995 with an initial offering of three million shares of common stock that brought in $39.6 million.

In an article in the July 12, 1996 issue of Investor's Business Daily, Truchard said, "with LabVIEW," the company's flagship application software, the company's "goal was to do for scientists and engineers what the spreadsheet had done for financial analysis."

The overall industrial automation market was believed to be worth about $20 billion in 1997.

Digilent was founded in 2000 by two Washington State University electrical engineering professors, Clint Cole and Gene Apperson and grew to become a multinational corporation in the engineering education sector, with sales of test and development products to thousands of universities.

The company launched its first international manufacturing unit in Debrecen, Hungary, and by 2006, it had around 40 sales offices opened globally.

In January 2013, National Instruments acquired all outstanding shares of Digilent Inc., which became a wholly owned subsidiary.