VEE Museum

Artifacts dating from the inception of VEE on HPUX at Hewlett Packard through the final days on Windows at Keysight. Most of the material here is no longer available anywhere else including from the vendors now that they have deleted it. This museum though intends to remain indefinitely as a testament to a revolutionary and eminently useful tool.

Other museums for HP products:  HP Computer Museum, HP Calculators, HP Memory Project, Kenneth Kuhn's Museum

The intention is for this Museum to be as complete and accurate as possible, so if you have any corrections or materials to add, please send them in. Email to stan@worldbadminton.com 

 

Early History

Before VEE (late 80's) there were two principal precursors.

Platforms

In the era when VEE was being developed, the internet existed but the Web did not. Bulletin boards and USNET were the social media of the day, generally accessed through dial-up modems. Windows did not exist but DOS did.  Most "workstations" were dedicated to specific tasks such as word processing. HP computers tended to be designed as Instrument Controllers running various dedicated operating systems based on programming environments. HPL at first, then PAWS and RMBWS, generally running on Motorola processors. This was the dawn of the CISC vs RISC rivalry that was settled a decade later when RISC died along with Unix.

Most computer interfaces were text-only, though limited graphics were starting to be available. Track balls were the latest pointers. Touch screens existed for the larger monitors (12" or so) but were IR based and of limited usability. Most test equipment was programmable either via RS232 or GPIB interfaces. Production teams of this era tended to have dedicated programming resources available to automate their test lines. Not having access to the same sort of resources nor the time (and in most cases the expertise) to do the programming themselves, this left the  typical engineer to tweak knobs and scribble in notebooks. This lead to discrepancies between R&D and Production test results due to differing methodology and became one of the big reasons why product handoff was a difficult process.

Into this environment the graphical VEE toolset was quite novel and represented a great leap in productivity, enabling the typical engineer to program their own tests with minimal effort. VEE's graphical environment was new enough that early class participants needed to be shown how to use a mouse, what icons were, and so on. But at the same time, the close resemblance to block diagrams made VEE very approachable.

The first releases were on Unix platforms, then Windows was quickly adopted. By the turn of the century Unix was dead, Windows dominated and Linux was emerging. While a Linux VEE existed, it was never released due to low interest. VEE was written in what was at that time an obscure (though very useful) language. Since by 2000 other C variants like C++ had become very wide spread, this was considered a major drawback. Ironically, fast forward 20 years, and that original language (Objective C) has become one of the best supported and widely used languages.

Release History

HP Era (<2000)

Robert Helsel writes two excellent books regarding VEE:
Cutting Test development Time Cutting Your Test Development Time with HP VEE (ISBN 0-13-099987-3) and Graphical ProgrammingGraphical Programming: A Tutorial for HP VEE (ISBN 0-13-362823-X).

As part of (or perhaps in spite of?) the traditional "stealth marketing",  HP was quite busy proactively supporting products such as VEE. One such effort was the HP Educator's Corner, a series of experiments designed for use in engineering and science classrooms. These tended to use simple equipment and were very hands-on and practical in nature. One of these is Virtual Lab 3, which uses VEE to gather experimental data. Other efforts involved encouraging usage in Universities, such as this lower division engineering lab at Northwestern. In this period HP understood the importance of introducing products to prospective engineers. HP Publications Industry Publications

1999 Summary of HP VEE - released before the split with Agilent: Common Utilities

Agilent Era (2000-2013)

As development moves to Malaysia the decision is made to migrate from Objective C to Microsoft dotNet for new features. March 2005 - Agilent purchases Vxl from Pass Technologies, founded by former HP R&D Engineer Greg Wale. This VEE addon enables simple connection to Microsoft Excel in VEE 6 and beyond. Agilent incorporates Vxl as the Excel Library in future releases of VEE. Agilent purchases rights to Practical Graphical Programming Practical Graphical Programming (ISBN 13: 978-1852338701) written by Angus and Hulbert then incorporates the text as part of VEE's standard documentation.

Keysight (2014-?)

Keysight VEE AppNotes

Keysight Support FAQ

Licensing

In keeping with the long-held Hewlett Packard policy, up through VEE 3.2 licensing was strictly an honor system. That is, customers were trusted to not use the code that they had not purchased. There were no codewords or anything needed at install or run time. After 3.2 FlexLM was introduced in nodelock mode. Fortunately flex stayed well in the background and was mostly invisible to the end user.

VEE 4 introduced a Serial Number needed for installing and tracking but at the same time all was plain text so really still an honor system

VEE 6.1 was an abortive attempt at FlexLM floating licenses that was universally disliked and quickly discarded.

VEE 6.2 was back to an honor system with a "product key" stored in plain text, still using FlexLM for the licensing mechanism. This policy remains in effect.

© 2015-2025. All Rights Reserved. Stan Bischof (stan@worldbadminton.com). Last updated 03 February 2023 13:03.