1990s
After outgrowing its rented space, NI relocated to a new building at 6504 Bridge Point Parkway in 1990, which the company purchased in 1991. That building, located along Lake Austin near the Loop 360 Bridge, became known as "Silicon Hills Bridge Point."
NI received its first patent for LabVIEW in 1991. Later that same 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. NI also created the National Instruments Alliance Partner program. (NIAP) In 1993, the company reached the milestone of $100 million in annual sales. In late 1993, NI released LabWindows/CVI for C/C++ programmers.. The following year, an employee began experiments with the relatively new World Wide Web and developed natinst.com, the company's very first web page.[8]
The company began to run out of room on its approximately 136000 sqft campus. In 1994, NI broke ground on a new campus, located at a 72 acre site along North Mopac Boulevard in northern Austin. By this time, NI had reached 1,000 employees.[9] The new NI campus, which opened in 1998, 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 is lined with windows and features an open floor plan.[10] Employees had been granted stock in the privately held company as part of their compensation packages. When NI went public in 1995, over 300 current and former employees owned stock. The company was listed on the Nasdaq exchange as NATI.[11]
By the late 1990s, the company provided more advanced DAQ boards that could replace vendor-defined instruments with a custom PC-based system.[10] With the company's acquisition of Georgetown Systems Lookout software, NI products were further incorporated into applications run on the factory floor. By 1996, the company had reached $200 million in annual sales and was named to Forbes magazine's 200 Best Small Companies list. NI would later release machine vision software and hardware.[12] 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.[9]
