This page requires a lot of additional work. Please contribute your input in the comments.
Always, please contribute info on Senior Management Positions such as VPs or Executive VPs.
1976: James Truchard, Jeff Kodosky, and Bill Nowlin start moonlighting in Truchard Garage
1977: First GP-IB controller board for PDP 11. First sold to Kelly Air Force Base, San Antonio, TX.
First full-time employee, Kim Harrison-Hosen to handle orders, billing and customer inquiries.
1978: Move offices to Burnet Road
1979:
1980: Founders quit their jobs and to work full-time at National Instruments
1981:
1982:
1983: NI lands large OEM contract for GP-IB controllers for the IBM-PC. This is a market breakthrough for NI.
1984:Apple introduces the Macintosh with a graphical user interface. This inspires Jeff Kodosky to think about how instruments can be controlled graphically.
1985:
1986: LabVIEW 1.0 is introduced for the Apple Mac. NI achieves its first 1 million dollar sales month and hires 100th employee.
1987: LabWIndows Version 1.0 for DOS introduced. This introduces a Windowing systems on top of DOS, and the trademark Windows is sold to Microsoft in 19xx.
Opens first international branch office in Tokyo.
1988: France and UK sales offices opened.
1989: First issue of quarterly Instrumentation newsletter
1990: LabVIEW 2.0 Introduced marking the first mature release and sparking significant growth.
1991: $59.5 million in revenue with net income of $3 million.
1992: LabVIEW 2.5 introduced for Windows and Sun workstations. The release on Windows triggers a major growth phase of National Instruments.
1993: First $100 million annual revenue
1994: Company incorporates in Delaware and prepared for IPO
1995: March 15: Company goes public with an IPO on NASDAQ. Three million shares issued raise $39.6 million which are put in the bank as a rainy day buffer. ‘
First NI Week (the annual developers conference) held at the Austin Arboretum Renaissance hotel.
1996: Fieldbus released, marking NI’s entry into the industrial automation market.
1997:10 PXI bus products announced at NI Week in August. PXI Systems Alliance created, with the notable absence of Agilent ((the spin-off of the instrumentation part of Hewlett-Packard) which was invited to join three weeks before the public announcement of the first PXI products.
1998: LabVIEW 5.0 released with the much requested “Undo” feature.
1999: LabVIEW Real Time for embedded applications released.
2000: Annual sales pass $400 million.
2007: Agilent joins the PXI System Alliance on May 1.
2017: Alex Davern becomes CEO in January after James Truchard.
2020: Erik Starkloff becomes the new CEO of National Instruments.
National Instruments re-brands itself as NI as part of a major transformation of its business model