Following its acquisition by Emerson Electric, NI has operated the company’s test and measurement business unit since October 2023.

[1] In the early 1970s, James Truchard, Jeff Kodosky, and Bill Nowlin were employed at the University of Texas at Austin Applied Research Laboratories.

[4] With a $10,000 loan from Interfirst Bank, the group purchased a PDP-11/04 minicomputer and embarked on their first project by designing and building a GPIB interface for it.

In 1977, they took a significant step by hiring their first full-time employee, Kim Harrison-Hosen, who was responsible for handling orders, billing, and customer inquiries.

By the end of that year, they had sold three boards, and to encourage further business, the company produced and distributed a mailer to 15,000 users of the PDP-11 minicomputer.

This led to the creation of NI's flagship product, the LabVIEW graphical development platform for the Macintosh computer, which was released in 1986.

Later in the 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.

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.

It contains dedicated "play" areas, including basketball and volleyball courts, an employee gym, and a campus-wide walking trail.

By the late 1990s, the more advanced DAQ boards were provided by the company, which could replace vendor-defined instruments with a custom PC-based system.

[6] With the company's acquisition of Georgetown Systems Lookout software, NI products were further incorporated into applications run on the factory-floor.

[7] User traffic and e-commerce rapidly improved after the company acquired the ni.com domain and began investing in web technologies.

Upon completion of this building, the NI campus finally had enough capacity to move all Austin-based employees to a single location.

[7] Research and Development centers are located in the United States, Germany, India, Romania, China, Canada, and Malaysia.

[12] On May 4, 2021, NI announced the acquisition of monoDrive, a provider of simulation software for advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicle development.

Interactive Image Technologies was founded in Toronto, Ontario, by Joe Koenig, and specializes in producing educational movies and documentaries.

An exhibition hall allows selected industry integrators and suppliers to showcase their products, and various customers or university students also present papers on their work with NI tools.