A fundação da National Instruments Corp (ITA 2008)
Taking Measure With Hardware and Software
The researchers who founded National Instruments Corp switched from building their own equipment to beefing up other people’s.
“You could start a company.” That offhand comment by Jim Physics intuition Truchard got Jeff Kodosky and Bill Nowlin thinking. Within days, Truchard and his two employees at the Applied Research Both Kodosky and Truchard point to their physics training as playing Laboratories (ARL) at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) a role in their success with National Instruments. Says Truchard, decided to give it a go. That was in February 1976. By May, the “Acoustical measurements are fairly tricky, and it happens to be a trio had incorporated. Today, National Instruments Corp has smaller area where you didn’t have off-the-shelf equipment. You annual Sales topping $425 million, employs more than 3100 had to build equipment. That background, and the measurements people, sells some 1500 hardware and software products, and, for themselves, created a basis.” What’s more, he adds, “the physics five years running, has been rated by Fortune magazine as one of background helps create good intuition. I think having solved the 100 best companies to work for. differential equations and learned about gradients, you know how things are going to work out. I’ve always felt it helped me develop At ARL, Truchard headed an underwater acoustic intuition about business.” measurements lab. “I had about two dozen different projects, all the way from basic acoustics to pragmatic testing of military sonar In leaving academic research, says Kodosky, “we took a giant beam formers,” he says. Truchard went into science because of step back from what we were working on. ARL was cutting edge. Sputnik. “I was right on the cusp of that movement. We were all Now it was customers who were doing the interesting experiments.” taking Russian and physics,” he says. He earned bachelor’s and Still, he and Truchard say they have more impact on science by master’s degrees in physics and did his PhD — on a nonlinear supplying tools than they would have had as researchers. “We can parametric acoustic receiving array — in electrical engineering, all have a nonlinear effect on the productivity of the science and at UT. Kodosky and Nowlin both worked part-time for Truchard engineering community. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that while enrolled at UT. Nowlin earned a master’s in electrical our virtual instrumentation can make people 5 to 10 times as engineering and Kodosky, who has a bachelor’s in physics from productive,” Kodosky says. “I personally would find it frustrating [to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, worked toward a PhD; he drifted do research] because it’s slow, but dropping by a customer’s site between theoretical high-energy physics and computer science but every couple of years is fun. We live vicariously through them.” did not complete the degree. (…) Toni Feder
Physics Today, July 2004
Fonte: Physics Today, 2004-07.
Considere as seguintes afirmações: I. Truchard, Nowlin e Kodosky fundaram a empresa National Instruments Corp, em 1976. II. A National Instruments Corp atua na área de informática e, de acordo com a Revista Fortune, está entre as 100 empresas mais produtivas nesta área. III. Nowlin e Kodosky trabalhavam para Truchard, em tempo parcial, enquanto estudavam na Universidade do Texas. Está(ão) correta(s)
- A) apenas a I.
- B) apenas a II.
- C) apenas a III.
- D) apenas I e III.
- E) apenas II e III.