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 o¥ered to acquire data, control instruments, and analyze and present data from a PC without sacriŸcing performance or functionality. Since then, the development and evolution of all aspects of VI-PC processors, memory, bus and networking technologies, so£ware 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.
