Brooks wrote his first LabVIEW software as a graduate student at the University of Utah.  This first application positioned an air velocity transducer in a wind tunnel using stepper motors, acquired air velocity data, and logged the data to file.  Brooks had so much fun working with LabVIEW that  after finishing his Masters degree he went to work for National Instruments in Austin, Texas.

Brooks quickly learned LabVIEW and National Instruments and became a team leader and later an engineering manager.  However,  he missed working with the bits and bytes of computer programming and decided to leave the management world to continue writing LabVIEW software applications.