LabVIEW for Windows and LabVIEW for Sun 

Graphical Programming Software for Building Instrumentation Systems Now
Available on Three Popular Scientific and Engineering Computing Platforms

September 1, 1992 -- Austin, TX-National Instruments announced worldwide
today that a new portable version of its award-winning LabVIEW scientific
and engineering software, a graphical programming package available on the
Apple Macintosh computer since 1986, is now available for IBM PCs running
Microsoft Windows and Sun Microsystems SPARCstations running OpenWindows
or MITs X Window System. The company made the announcement simultaneously
from corporate headquarters in Austin and from its 14 international branch
offices, located in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany,
Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the
United Kingdom.

New LabVIEW Means More Choices and Cross-Platform Compatibility One of the
company's key charters has always been to give users many choices when
building their instrumentation systems. The company offers both
high-performance and low-cost data acquisition and instrument control
hardware for multiple computers and operating systems, as well as a
variety of software development tools. Now that LabVIEW is available on
two new computer platforms, users can develop graphical instrumentation
programs under the Windows, Sun, or Macintosh operating systems. And if
they are using DOS, they can still choose the company's popular LabWindows
for DOS to develop traditional text-based programs.

The decision to port to two new platforms simultaneously accomplished
several goals. First, the company's customers can now choose to use the
LabVIEW technology on three industry-standard computing platforms. Second,
they have the freedom and flexibility to transfer their graphical
application programs between the new platforms and optimize performance
and cost by mixing computers in the system. Virtual instrument (VI)
programs developed with LabVIEW software for Sun systems and LabVIEW for
Windows are portable between these platforms. "We rewrote LabVIEW so that
the internal code is platform independent," explains Dr. James Truchard
(Ph.D.), president of National Instruments. "We added new window and file
managers, as well as separate compilers, for each platform. Users can
develop VIs for one platform that will run on another platform. For our
users, this level of portability ensures a common look and feel, identical
operation on all platforms, and the security that they are not locked into
a particular computing platform. The portability also gives us the benefit
of being able to port LabVIEW easily to other operating systems with
minimal development effort."

User Profiles and Target Applications 

National Instruments customers are typically scientists or engineers who
need to measure, monitor, or control a unit under test or some other type
of process of real-world phenomenon using an industry-standard personal
computer or workstation. Although most customers' needs are very similar
in terms of their measurement and control hardware, their software needs
and programming skills are very diverse. "Where our LabWindows for DOS is
for experienced QuickBASIC and C programmers," explains Jack Barber,
LabVIEW marketing manager, "LabVIEW has gained the unique distinction of
being accepted by both experienced and novice programmers."

"Because LabVIEW is a complete programming language- featuring programming
structures, modularity, hierarchy, and extensibility - many professional
programmers choose it over a textbased language because they can develop
their applications faster in the graphical environment," continues Barber.
"Plus, LabVIEW's unique graphical compiler delivers performance sufficient
for virtually any application. LabVIEW has also been adopted by scientists
and engineers who needed to harness the power of a computer, but aren't
professional programmers or computer scientists. LabVIEW's graphical
programming methodology offers them an attractive alternative to
conventional programming - graphical ease of use and programming
flexibility."

Because LabVIEW is an affordable, general-purpose programming tool that
does not sacrifice performance or flexibility, it is now used in a wide
variety of application areas, including laboratory automation, process
monitoring and control, electronics test, manufacturing, automotive and
aerospace engineering, medical research, and educational instruction and
research.

LabVIEW for Windows - The Impact on Market Share 

While the company doesn't expect the LabVIEW user profile to change
dramatically with the availability of a version for Windows, it does
expect to see the product capture more market share in existing
application areas as well as expand into new ones. "With the huge
installed base of 386 computers and the growing popularity of Windows,
there exists an enormous potential for immediate volume LabVIEW sales,"
explains Truchard. "Like the Macintosh version, LabVIEW for Windows will
be used in virtually all science and engineering disciplines, but on a
much larger scale. We have seen an overwhelming interest in Windows at our
seminars held earlier this year, and we encountered quite a need for
LabVIEW for Windows. Another measuring stick is that users have been
asking for LabVIEW on the PC for years - and lately specifically for
LabVIEW for Windows."

"Not only will we offer an innovative alternative to those customers
already automating their systems with conventional tools," continues
Truchard, "but now we'll be able to attract those PC users who haven't yet
automated their instrumentation applications because the software tools
were too cumbersome for them to use, and also those users who want to
replace an existing, outdated system with one that offers more
ease-of-use, flexibility, performance, and options for future expansion.
Making an innovative, proven graphical programming product available on
the PC will definitely expand our market share."

"Based on several factors, including the overwhelming success of LabVIEW
for the Macintosh, the huge installed base of 386 PCs, and the growing
popularity of Windows, we believe that LabVIEW for Windows will quickly
rise to the top of instrumentation software packages and quite possibly
even outsell our popular DOS-based LabWindows package," predicts Ray
Almgren, software marketing manager at National Instruments. "Because we
have a full range of instrumentation hardware (plug-in data acquisition
boards and GPIB and VXI instrument interfaces) available for PC/AT/EISA
and PS/2 computers and a large installed base of users, applications for
LabVIEW for Windows will span a wide range of markets and industries. The
potential for an order of magnitude increase in unit sales is very real.
And with our tight coupling of hardware and software, that's a very
significant impact on our business."

Propelling Windows into the Test and Measurement Market 

As for the general test and measurement (T&M) market, the company believes
that LabVIEW for Windows will actually help make Windows a standard
platform for instrumentation applications. "From the attendees of our
Windows seminars, we found a great deal of interest and desire to use
Windows, but a lack of development tools for Windows-based T&M
applications," says Almgren. "Although development systems like Visual
Basic do make it easy to develop general Windows applications, they do not
have the specific tools needed for T&M, such as I/O control, instrument
drivers, analysis routines, and the specialized graphical user interface
(GUI) development tools with scientific graphs, strip charts, and
instrument panel controls. LabVIEW delivers all of these features."

The company maintains that one of the reasons LabVIEW for the Macintosh was
so successful was that it made a difficult-to-program computer very easy
to use. "Making low-level calls to the Mac OS to develop T&M applications
is very difficult, but LabVIEW hides all of those difficulties," says
Almgren. "Similarly, LabVIEW for Windows removes the difficult part of
Windows programming. It is easy to forget that operating systems based
upon GUIs are easy to use only if the applications that run on the OS have
a GUI built into them. Building a GUI using the Windows Software
Development Toolkit is extremely difficult. One of the keys to the success
of both LabWindows and LabVIEW has been their ability to deliver
sophisticated GUI development tools that are very easy to use."

"Windows has introduced very powerful programming concepts to the
Intel-based PC industry, including the concept of event-driven programming
for nonpreemptive multitasking applications," adds Barber. "LabVIEW's
dataflow programming exactly matches the Windows architecture, so that the
event-driven programming is a transparent and inherent part of building a
LabVIEW program."

LabVIEW for Sun - Bridging Design and Test with Graphical Programming 

National Instruments is equally enthusiastic about the large potential for
LabVIEW on the Sun, for several reasons. While Sun Microsystems Computer
Corporation is the dominant supplier of workstations for the electronic
design automation (EDA) market, its systems are not currently as widely
used in the T&M arena - primarily due to the lack of instrumentation
application software for its workstations. With pressure on manufacturers
to fully embrace and implement concurrent engineering concepts, it is
imperative that sophisticated tools for all phases of the design-to-test
process run on the same computer platform. "Elegant design software for
workstations has been available for some time," explains Truchard, "and
now, with LabVIEW, test engineers will have access to the same level of
sophisticated software tools that design engineers have had for years.
Porting LabVIEW to the Sun for test and measurement applications is a very
natural extension for us and plays an important role in Sun's concurrent
engineering strategy."

The performance capabilities of the SPARCstation are also a perfect match
for the demanding data acquisition and analysis requirements of scientists
and engineers, such as the need to acquire and store large quantities of
data, analyze it with powerful processors, display it with high resolution
graphics, and share it over a network of multiple computer systems. With
LabVIEW for Sun, they can easily build manufacturing and test systems that
integrate different types of instrumentation hardware, including VXIbus
modular instruments, across a network. "For example," says Barber, "a
SPARCstation equipped with our SB-MXI interface can easily handle the
faster data transfer capabilities of VXIbus systems. LabVIEW supplies the
GUI not found on VXIbus instruments, presents an integrated environment
for controlling multiple instruments, and offers the TCP/IP compatibility
for sharing information across the network."

"LabVIEW for Sun users will definitely put the software through its paces,"
remarks Truchard. "And we are confident it will meet their highest
expectations."

LabVIEW for Sun - Data Acquisition for a Data Analysis Machine

The engineering and scientific community has already embraced the Sun
workstation for many of its demanding computing needs. Using its
high-performance RISC architecture, large amounts of memory, and
high-resolution graphics, engineers and scientists can now accomplish
sophisticated data analysis in their offices that previously required
supercomputer time. There are now a wide variety of analysis software
packages that use the power of the SPARCstation, but the tools for
acquiring real-world data into the workstation for analysis have been
lacking.

In the past, Sun users have relied on a PC-based test and measurement
system (an attractive, lowcost platform) to control instrumentation and
acquire the data. The data was then transferred from the PC over a network
to a higher-performance workstation for analysis. This data transfer
bottleneck resulted in a system that lacks the real-time performance
needed in many applications.

As the price of Sun workstations has fallen, they have become more
attractive platforms for building an integrated instrumentation system for
both data analysis and acquisition. Sun-based hardware and driver-level
software for acquiring data from IEEE 488 and VXI instruments has been
readily available, but application software has been virtually
non-existent. Now users can employ LabVIEW to seamlessly integrate all
components of the system.

Instead of being restricted to developing cryptic text based programs in a
language such as C, users have LabVIEW for Sun as a viable alternative.
They can use intuitive graphical programming tools and ready-to-use
libraries to build a workstation-class instrumentation system that
integrates data acquisition, analysis, and presentation. Users can now
create dedicated Sun-based instrument controllers that deliver the
necessary computing power for their real-time instrumentation systems.

LabVIEW - A Technology Pioneered and Proven on the Macintosh and Destined
to Remain the Industry Leader 

National Instruments remains devoted to its Macintosh customer base and
continues its history of active participation in Macintosh-related events
for the scientific and engineering market, such as The Consortium for
Industrial and Laboratory Applications of the Macintosh and MacSciTech.
"Our LabVIEW Macintosh customers have truly been pioneers - first in
pioneering the use of a graphical OS environment and then pioneering the
use of graphical programming," says Truchard. "These pioneering efforts
have had a significant impact on the development of both LabVIEW for
Windows and LabVIEW for Sun. Even our very first customers were able to
share our excitement of what LabVIEW could accomplish. LabVIEW's unique
graphical/block diagram programming methodology and intuitive GUI
attracted the type of sophisticated scientific and engineering users who
could visualize how they could apply it in their area of expertise. They
set lofty goals for what they wanted LabVIEW to do and have helped us to
refine the product with six years of customer feedback. Their dedication
to LabVIEW, even though it ran on what we called at the time the
'underdog' platform, gave us the motivation to continue enhancing it and
actually helped shaped what it has become. We are indebted to them and are
using this new portable technology to further refine our Macintosh
products."

Over and over, LabVIEW has demonstrated its capabilities in an extremely
broad spectrum of applications with tremendous success. "LabVIEW had to
prove itself to survive and it has," says Truchard. "It not only survived
on a platform that has not been a leading instrumentation computing
platform, but it is now one of the top five products in the PC
instrumentation software arena, and the undisputed market leader for
Macintosh instrumentation software."

The company maintains that the Macintosh remains an attractive platform for
engineering and scientific computing. The NuBus multimaster architecture
and linear address space can handle the most demanding data acquisition
applications. In addition, Apple continues to enhance its computers and
operating systems, which is reflected in the performance of the Quadra
series and the interapplication communication capabilities of System 7.

"While LabVIEW has been recognized as the leading Macintosh instrumentation
software product," says Barber, "its success in the general
instrumentation market has been limited by the acceptance of the Macintosh
platform- which now has about 15 percent of the personal computer market.
Nevertheless, we believe that the Macintosh is an excellent platform that
will continue to gain market acceptance. We intend to continue to promote
its use, to invest in R&D efforts, and to dominate this growing market."

Building Custom Instrumentation Systems with Graphical Programming 

In 1986, National Instruments pioneered graphical programming by offering
LabVIEW, the first complete, viable alternative to conventional
programming systems. Innovative concepts such as the VI, programming
structures, and hierarchy solidified the data flow architecture with
structured programming concepts. By 1990, the U.S. Patent Office had
issued two extensive patents on the LabVIEW technology (Numbers 4,914,568
and 4,901,221). Also in 1990, National Instruments introduced LabVIEW 2,
incorporating four years of customer feedback. Most importantly, LabVIEW 2
features a graphical compiler that generates machine code from the block
diagrams so that VI run at speeds comparable to those of compiled C
programs.

Because of its unique graphical programming environment, LabVIEW is ideally
suited for developing modem computer-based instrumentation systems,
whether for data acquisition and control or test and measurement. With
graphical programming, the hardware interface basically becomes
transparent to the user- whether you are using RS-232, GPIB, or VXI
instruments, or plug-in data acquisition and digital signal processing
(DSP) boards, ready-to-use libraries in the software take care of all the
hardware interface details. And with the LabVIEW GUI capabilities, users
can quickly combine functions from different instruments to create their
own customized VIs.

LabVIEW has extensive libraries for instrument control, plug-in data
acquisition, DSP, signal conditioning, data analysis, and presentation.

Instrument Control. The LabVIEW Instrument Driver VI Library has over 200
ready-to-use drivers for controlling the most popular GPIB, VXI, and
RS-232 instruments from over 40 different manufacturers. This list will
continue to grow, primarily through the efforts of the company's
Instrument Library Developer Program.

The LabVIEW GPIB VI Library communicates with IEEE 488 instruments via the
company's GPIB products for PC AT, EISA, PS/2, Macintosh, and SPARCstation
computers. The company has plug-in GPIB boards, an external GPIB-to-SCSI
controller, an Ethernet-to-GPIB Controller, and an extensive line of GPIB
support products (expanders, extenders, buffer, and analyzers). The
controller products have transfer rates of over 1 Mbyte/sec and are
completely IEEE 488.2 compatible.

The LabVIEW VXI VI Library communicates with VXI instruments using the
company's NI-VXI software and interface hardware. National Instruments
manufactures products for all three methods of controlling VXI systems -
embedded computer control, external computer control via GPIB, and
external computer control via the high-speed MXI-bus.

Plug-in Data Acquisition and Signal Conditioning. The LabVIEW Data
Acquisition VI Library controls the company's data acquisition hardware
for PC/XT/AT, EISA, PS/2, and Macintosh computers. These products feature
various combinations of analog, digital, and timing inputs and outputs,
and can be easily integrated with the SCXI signal conditioning products
for isolating, amplifying, and multiplexing signals. The plug-in data
acquisition boards use the latest technologies such as custom
instrumentation amplifiers, antialiasing filters, true 1 bit accuracy, and
RTSI bus for multiboard synchronization.

The Data Acquisition VI Library is built upon the NI-DAQ driver-level
software. NI-DAQ serves as an operating system for data acquisition
boards, providing data and buffer management capabilities and a resource
manager. Through the Data Acquisition VI Library, users can acquire data
and process it simultaneously, stream data to and from disk, and use
multiple- functions on multiple boards simultaneously.

Data Analysis. The LabVIEW Analysis VI libraries offer a powerful set of
analysis functions for processing acquired data. These comprehensive
libraries, rivaling those of standalone analysis packages, can be
integrated directly with the acquisition. These analysis functions give
users complete flexibility to develop applications in areas ranging from
statistical process control to DSP and joint time-frequency analysis. The
Analysis VI Library includes functions for array manipulation, complex
arithmetic, and basic statistical functions. The Advanced Analysis VI 
Library has all these functions, plus Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) and
Fast Hartley Transform (FHT) integration, differentiation, convolution,
and correlation, power spectrum and pulse parameters; finite impulse
response and infinite impulse response digital filters; windowing
functions, signal generation; linear, exponential, and polynomial curve
fitting; advanced statistics; and complex and matrix operations.

Real-Time Acquisition and Analysis with DSP. Engineers and scientists
involved in applications such as shock and vibration, audio, acoustics,
speech, and sonar often need to analyze data in real time or at speeds
much higher than the capability of the computer microprocessor. LabVIEW
for Windows will control the company's AT-DSP2200 board for PC AT and EISA
computers. The AT-DSP2200 combines dynamic signal acquisition features
(16-bit, 92 dB SNR, -95 dB THD) with the AT&T WEDSP32C DSP processor to
simultaneously acquire data and process it at up to 25 MFLOPS. LabVIEW for
Macintosh users have a choice of several DSP accelerator boards, ranging
in performance from 27 to 40 MFLOPS.

Portable LabVIEW Will Expand Third-Party Markets through Alliance Program 

The National Instruments Alliance Program formally joins the company with
systems integrators, VARs, OEMS, consultants, and developers who deliver a
variety of targeted application solutions to end users. The list of add-on
products based on LabVIEW for Macintosh continues to grow, and includes
packages for electrochemistry, image processing and analysis, laser beam
image acquisition and analysis, motion control, factory automation,
historical trending and analysis, and three-dimensional plotting. Several
of these vendors conducted beta testing for the new LabVIEW versions and
will soon announce either ported versions of existing products or
completely new add-on solutions. See Third-Party section in press notebook
for additional information.

System Requirements 

The minimum configuration for LabVIEW for Windows is a 386 PC with a 387
coprocessor, 8 megabytes RAM, 10 megabytes hard disk space, Microsoft
Windows 3.1, and DOS 5.0. A Super VGA display and a Windows 3.1 compatible
graphics accelerator are recommended.

The minimum configuration for LabVIEW for Sun is a SPARCstation with 24
megabytes main memory, 32 megabytes disk swap space, and 10 megabytes disk
space (for the application and associated files). LabVIEW for Sun will run
under OpenWindows Version 3 or MITs X Window System, Version 11, Release 4
or 5. It does not require Motif or OPEN LOOK.

The minimum configuration for LabVIEW for Macintosh is any Macintosh
computer with at least 4 megabytes of memory, a hard disk, and System
6.0.3 or later. Five megabytes of memory is recommended for use with
System 7.0 or later.

Price and Availability LabVIEW for Windows and LabVIEW for Sun will be
available in September from National Instruments. Pricing has not yet been
approved, but will be available by mid-June 1992.

For More Information For more information, please contact National
Instruments at 6504 Bridge Point Parkway, Austin, TX 78730-5039, (512)
794-0100. Call toll-free in the U.S. and Canada at (800) 433-3488. Fax:
(512) 794-8411.

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