. for other uses see national instrument disambiguation . a major contributor to this article appears to have a close connection with its subject . it may require cleanup to comply with wikipedia s content policies particularly neutral point of view . please discuss further on the talk page . september 2013 learn how and when to remove this template message national instruments corporation national instruments campus in austin texas type public traded as nasdaq nati founded 1976 founder james truchard bill nowlin jeff kodosky headquarters austin texas u.s. key people james truchard chairman and ceo products labwindows cvi labview pxi daq crio teststand roborio revenue us 1.24 billion 2014 1 operating income us 145.187 million 2014 1 net income us 126.333 million 2014 1 total assets us 1.455 billion 2014 1 total equity us 1.117 billion 2014 1 number of employees 7 084 december 2014 2 website www.ni.com national instruments corporation or ni is an american multinational company with international operation . headquartered in austin texas it is a producer of automated test equipment and virtual instrumentation software . common applications include data acquisition instrument control and machine vision . in 2012 the company sold products to more than 35 000 companies with revenues of 1.12 billion usd . contents 1 history 1.1 founding 1.2 1980s 1.3 1990s 1.4 2000s 2 products 3 groups 3.1 electronics workbench group 4 community 5 see also 6 references 7 external links history edit founding edit in the early 1970s james truchard jeff kodosky and bill nowlin 3 were working at the university of texas at austin applied research laboratories . as part of a project conducting research for the u.s. navy the men were using early computer technology to collect and analyze data . frustrated with the inefficient data collection methods they were using the three decided to create a product that would enable their task to be done more easily . in 1976 working in the garage at truchard s home the three founded a new company . 4 they attempted to incorporate under several names including longhorn instruments and texas digital but all were rejected . finally they settled on the current name of national instruments . 5 with a 10 000 loan from interfirst bank the group bought a pdp 11 04 minicomputer and for their first project designed and built a gpib interface for it . 6 their first sale was the result of a cold call to kelly air force base in san antonio texas . 5 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 . by the end of the year they had sold three boards and to attract more business the company produced and sent a mailer to 15 000 users of the pdp 11 minicomputer . as sales increased they were able to move into a real office space in 1978 occupying a 600 square foot 56 m2 office at 9513 burnet road in austin texas . 6 1980s edit at the end of the 1970s the company booked 400 000 in orders recording a 60 000 profit . in 1980 truchard kodosky and nowlin quit their jobs to devote themselves full time to national instruments and at the end of the year moved the company to a larger office renting 5 000 square feet 500 m2 of office space . to assist in generating revenue the company undertook numerous special projects working on a fuel pump credit card system and a waveform generator for i.s. navy sonar acoustic testing . by 1981 the company reached the 1 million sales mark leading them to move to a 10 000 square foot 1 000 m2 office in 1982 . 6 in 1983 national instruments reached an organizational milestone developing their first gpib board to connect instruments to ibm pcs . with the arrival of the macintosh computer however the company felt ready to take advantage of the new graphical interfaces . kodosky began a research initiative with the assistance of student researchers at the university of texas into ways to exploit the new interface . this led to the creation of ni s flagship product the labview graphical development platform for the macintosh computer which was released in 1986 . 6 the software allows engineers and scientists to program graphically by wiring icons together instead of typing text based code . by allowing people to use a more intuitive less structured development environment their productivity greatly increased making labview quite popular . the following year a version of labview known as labwindows was released for the dos environment . 7 the company had 100 employees by 1986 . 7 7 as part of the company s decision to begin direct sales of its products ni opened its first international branch in tokyo japan in 1987 . 7 1990s edit after growing their staff enough to take over almost the entire building they were renting in 1990 ni moved to a new building at 6504 bridge point parkway which the company purchased in 1991 . the building located along lake austin near the loop 360 bridge became known as silicon hills bridge point . 7 ni received their first patent for labview in 1991 . later that year they introduced signal conditioning extensions for instrumentation scxi to expand the signal processing capabilities of the pc and in 1992 labview was first released for windows based pcs and unix workstations . to further assist their customers ni also created the national instruments alliance partner program attracting a worldwide selection of third party developers systems integrators and consultants who could extend the capabilities of the ni hardware and software . 7 with labview now available to a much larger audience in 1993 the company reached the milestone of 100 million in annual sales . to attract c c programmers later that year ni introduced labwindows cvi . the following year an industrious employee began experiments with the relatively new world wide web and developed natinst.com the company s very first web page . as the company continued to grow they began to run out of room in their approximately 136 000 square foot 12 600 m2 campus . in 1994 ni broke ground on a new campus located at a 72 acre 290 000 m2 site along north mopac boulevard in northern austin . by this time ni had reached 1000 employees . 8 the new ni campus which opened in 1998 was designed to be employee friendly . it contains dedicated play areas including basketball and volleyball courts an employee gym and a campus wide walking trail . each of the buildings on the campus are lined with windows and feature an open floor plan so that the employees seated in cubicles throughout the building are never far from the sun and views of northwest austin . to maintain the focus on equality among the employees even dr. t as the employees call their ceo sits in an open cubicle and does not have an assigned parking space . 7 employees had been granted stock in the privately held company as part of their compensation packages . when the company chose to go public in 1995 over 300 current and former employees owned stock . the company is now listed on the nasdaq exchange as nati . by the late 1990s customers had begun using labview in industrial automation applications . with labview and the more advanced daq boards provided by the company engineers could now replace expensive fixed function vendor defined instruments with a custom pc based system that would acquire analyze and present data with added flexibility and a lower cost . 7 with the company s acquisition of georgetown systems lookout software ni products were further incorporated into applications run on the factory floor . 8 by 1996 the company had reached 200 million in annual sales and was named to forbes magazine s 200 best small companies list . 8 over the next several years the engineers at ni continued to stretch the boundaries of virtual instrumentation releasing machine vision software and hardware which allow cameras to act as sensors and motion control hardware and software . ni also introduced the compactpci based pxi an open industry standard for modular measurement and automation and ni teststand which provides for tracking high volume manufacturing tests . 8 2000s edit user traffic and e commerce rapidly improved after the company acquired the ni.com domain and began investing in web technologies to better highlight their products . the company quickly introduced online configuration tools to help customers decide which ni products would best interact to solve their problem and introduced ni developer zone which provides the end user developers access to example programs sample code and development tips as well as forums in which users and ni employees could help answer questions about the products . 8 in the 2000s ni began exporting most of its manufacturing overseas by first opening its first international manufacturing plant in debrecen hungary . this 144 000 square foot 13 400 m2 plant helped to diversify the company s manufacturing capabilities which had been centered at company headquarters in austin . ni now manufactures nearly 90 % of its production in debrecen 1 and has expanded several times in the last decade . in 2011 with a multimillion dollar grant from the government ni increased production in debrecen by approximately 20 % . with state of the art automation processes headcount increased by only 2 % . 9 in 2002 the company dedicated the 379 000 square foot 35 200 m2 building c on their mopac campus which became the headquarters for the company s r & d operations . upon completion of this building the ni campus finally had enough capacity to move all austin based employees to a single location . 8 following the company model of selling directly to customers by 2006 ni had opened 21 sales offices in europe and 12 offices in the asia pacific region as well as a multitude of offices in the americas africa and the middle east . 8 research and development centers are located in the u.s. germany india romania china canada denmark and malaysia . products edit national instruments engineering software includes labview a graphical development environment labwindows cvi an ansi c programming environment measurement studio a set of components for microsoft visual studio ni teststand for test execution sequencing ni veristand for real time test ni diadem for data management ni multisim for circuit design ni ultiboard for pcb design ni vision builder for automated inspection ni labview signalexpress for data logging ni switch executive for switch management ni requirements gateway for requirements tracking national instruments hardware platforms include ni compactrio programmable fpga based industrial controller 10 ni compactdaq data acquisition systems for usb and ethernet 11 pxi platform a modular instrumentation standard with more than 1 500 products 12 groups edit electronics workbench group edit the national instruments electronics workbench group 13 is responsible for creating the electronic circuit design software ni multisim and ni ultiboard 14 which was previously a canada based company that first produced multisim and integrated ultiboard with it . interactive image technologies was founded in 1995 in toronto ontario canada by joe koenig and specialized in producing educational movies and documentaries . when the government of ontario needed an educational tool for teaching electronics in colleges the company created a circuit simulator called electronics workbench . in 1998 the company started a strategic partnership with another electronic design automation company named ultimate technology from naarden netherlands who was the european market leader in printed circuit board design software with their package ultiboard . like electronics workbench founder james post had focused heavily on the educational market and gained pr fame when he organized the distribution of 180 000 demo floppy