The (irreversible?) loss of historical documents!

[altenbach]

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@Jacobson-ni wrote:

I only started with LabVIEW 2012 so I guess I may deserve the "LabVIEW programmers have it so easy these days" comments.

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Yup. LabVIEW 1.2 broke all wires when one of the primitives was moved.

LabVIEW 4.0 had no undo (think twice, wire once...). 😄

Still, reading that manual always impressed me how complete and well thought out everything was.

I remember rumors around that time where people were talking about some new, revolutionary software from National Instruments. We had no need at the time, so we only jumped on it a few years later. Remember, it was much more difficult to get the word out back then (no internet, e-mail, twitter, etc. Just word of mouth and articles in byte magazine and similar.)

Have a look at this archived LabVIEW preview article from BYTE Magazine, September 1986. Wow!

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of LabVIEW (remember LabVIEW 8.20?), they had an original MAC on the showroom floor at NI Week where we could actually play with LabVIEW 1.2(?).. That was hard (only one mouse button, so no right-clicking!), small b&W screen.

[X.]

I wrote a NuBus LabVIEW interface for a camera back in the days, using a CIN to tap into a DLL (or whatever they were called on Macs at the time).

This was at the time when the Vision toolkit was a third party toolkit with no native image controls (images would be displayed in separate windows, limited to a total of 16).

And indeed there was no undo or autosave for that matter.

I went ballistic quite a few times after accidental Delete key presses...

[PaulG.]

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@altenbach wrote:

Some things are almost impossible to find using the search tools, but I absolutely love the LabVIEW manual from 1989. 😄

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Wow. That's beautiful. I feel like I'm looking at ancient hieroglyphs that I can actually understand. 

[SnowMule]

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@Intaris wrote:

Wow. A cd. I was expecting floppys. 

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It's a single-sided, low-density CD.

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@Jacobson-ni wrote:

Does anyone know what NuBus is?

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Apple's version of PCI, ISA, etc. 

I might still have a NuBus ethernet or AAUI card... don't remember what it was.  Back from the '040 days...

... those and SCSI terminators...

[altenbach]

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altenbach wrote:

Have a look at this archived LabVIEW preview article from BYTE Magazine, September 1986. Wow!

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The quoted 1986 prices are interesting

• LabVIEW ($1995)
• GPIB-MAC interface box ($595)
• MacBus box ($1495).

(Considering inflation, these prices need to be ~doubled to reflect todays dollars:o. So the two floppies worth of bits were about $4000! :D)

[Hooovahh]

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@altenbach wrote:

(Considering inflation, these prices need to be ~doubled to reflect todays dollars:o. So the two floppies worth of bits were about $4000! :D)

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Lets keep this going.  So in 1986 there was floppies with 720KB on each, but lets say for fun the floppies are only single sided 360KB floppies since the 720KB format had just came out in 1986 and it's possible LabVIEW 1.0 shipped on the older single sided 360KB.  That means on two floppies there were 737,280 Bytes, and at $4k that is about 184 Bytes per dollar, or 23 bits per dollar, assuming the 360KB floppies were filled.  I imagine no software today comes close that that compiled space, to dollar ratio, for multiple reasons.

[Hornless.Rhino]

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@altenbach wrote:

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@altenbach wrote:

Have a look at this archived LabVIEW preview article from BYTE Magazine, September 1986. Wow!

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The quoted 1986 prices are interesting

• LabVIEW ($1995)
• GPIB-MAC interface box ($595)
• MacBus box ($1495).

(Considering inflation, these prices need to be ~doubled to reflect todays dollars:o. So the two floppies worth of bits were about $4000! :D)

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Having said that, there you can pay several hundred just for some UI controls from the LabVIEW tools network.

[Intaris]

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@Hooovahh wrote:

184 Bytes per dollar, or 23 bits per dollar

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Shouldn't that be 184 Bytes per Dollar or 1472 bits per dollar?  That's almost exactly one dollar per Packet (1500 bytes) for a typical internet connection. Downloading the LV 2015 installer would cost a fortune! Over 1.3M Dollars to be precise.  I'd reconsider downloading the driver DVD in that situation......

[Hooovahh]

Yup, terrible at math.

[altenbach]

It is amazing how some areas of technology have gotten cheaper by orders of magnitude.

Back in the late eighties, a long distance call to europe was abou $1/minute, while now you can get an unsubsidized android smartphone for $4. 😄