NI (National Instruments) is an American multinational company that manufactures automated test equipment and virtual instrument software. They offer a variety of products and services to meet different application areas, including oscilloscopes, digital multimeters, waveform generators, and more. In this answer, we will discuss what National Instruments is, its history, and its products and services.
NI was founded in the late 1970s by three engineers, James Trachard, Jeff Kodowski and Bill Nowlin. The company initially developed GPIB boards to connect instruments to IBM PCS, and later, they created their flagship product, the LabVIEW graphics development platform for Macintosh computers, which was released in 1986. LabVIEW is a programming language that allows users to create programs by dragging and dropping ICONS onto a block diagram instead of writing lines of code. This makes it easier for engineers and scientists to program graphically, which greatly increases their productivity.
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