ABSTRACT
VI can be traced back to the birth of the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) PC (in 1981) and the emergence of general purpose interface bus (GPIB) as a tool that enabled engineers to use a PC to control and communicate with instruments to automate test and measurement tasks. In 1986, National Instruments introduced the LabVIEW graphical development environment, which oered to acquire data, control instruments, and analyze and present data from a PC without sacricing performance or functionality. Since then, the development and evolution of all aspects of VI-PC processors, memory, bus and networking technologies, soware technologies, and DAQ hardware-had a phenomenal growth. As a result, VIs are widely used in everything from simple, low-cost applications, such as environmental temperature monitoring, to large-scale, real-time measurement and control applications, such as the real-time control of over a hundred collimators to help control the particle beam in the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN.
