Before the Technology Blvd office where I started in 1982, NI had moved from four previous offices including Dr T’s garage.
I don’t know much about the other offices and the specific reason for each move, other than what I learned from Dr T and Jeff when we toured them together with Blake Snow as part of the research done to write the recently published book on NI called “Measuring History.”
I didn’t get the feeling the reason for those first few office moves was “rapid growth” in terms of people – they did comment that the first and second office was “small” but even when I started at Technology there weren’t that many people but they did use a lot of space for building products and shipping them out, storing inventory, test equipment, etc. – so the change in offices was probably driven by the fact that they were building all their stuff in-house themselves so space needs were primarily for manufacturing I think. I think the first and second moves may have been because they wanted more space and as I recall those were single buildings so they couldn’t just “knock down a wall and expand into the adjacent space like we did at Technology Blvd – the Shoal Creek one was in a strip center so they could have expanded like that there I guess but perhaps the next door spaces were occupied – I know at Technology Blvd in the late 1980s we reached the point where the tenants next door were long-time tenants and didn’t want to give up their space so that’s when we leased space across the street and split the company up – and brought everyone back together at the Millenium Building on Bridge Point Parkway.
After Bridge Point Parkway I worked the rest of my career and the current campus headquarters on Mopac in Northwest Austin.