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National Instruments expands Mac OS X offering with data acquisition and GPIB drivers

01/12/2005

Engineers and scientists now have more options for data acquisition (DAQ) and instrument control on Mac OS X with the new National Instruments DAQ and GPIB drivers for Mac OS X.

"National Instruments has enjoyed a loyal base of LabVIEW users on the Mac since the release of LabVIEW 1.0 for Mac in 1986," said Ray Almgren, NI vice president of product marketing. "We are excited to continue this success with the release of these DAQ and GPIB device drivers."

The NI-DAQmx Base driver for Mac OS X supports popular NI data acquisition hardware, including the PCI and PXI E Series DAQ devices, the DIO-96 digital I/O device and the new low-cost NI USB DAQ devices. The NI-488.2 driver, which provides Mac OS X GPIB support, works with the NI PCI-GPIB and the GPIB-ENET/100.

"The unique combination of rock solid UNIX-like stability and ease-of-use of the Mac interface has driven increasing adoption of Mac OS X in the research, science and engineering fields," said Ron Okamoto, vice president of worldwide developer relations. "We're thrilled that National Instruments has built upon its success with LabVIEW on Mac OS X by making its most popular hardware available on the platform to enable first rate data acquisition and instrument control."

Both the DAQ and GPIB drivers for Mac OS X use the same standard programming interfaces used on other operating systems, including Windows and Linux. These programming interfaces are available in widely used development environments such as NI LabVIEW. As a result, engineers can migrate existing NI data acquisition or GPIB LabVIEW applications to the Mac and use the same hardware on Mac OS X with minimal software rewrites.

With Mac OS X, engineers can connect to any network -- whether wired or wireless, Mac, UNIX or Windows-based. For more information on the new NI data acquisition and GPIB drivers for Mac OS X, readers can visit  www.ni.com/mac. NI is demonstrating the drivers this week at the Macworld Conference and Expo in San Francisco.

About National Instruments

National Instruments ( www.ni.com) is a technology pioneer and leader in virtual instrumentation -- a revolutionary concept that has changed the way engineers and scientists in industry, government and academia approach measurement and automation. Leveraging the PC and its related technologies, virtual instrumentation increases productivity and lowers costs through easy-to-integrate software, such as the NI LabVIEW graphical development environment, and modular hardware, such as PXI modules for data acquisition, instrument control and machine vision. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 3,100 employees and direct operations in 41 countries. In 2003, the company sold products to more than 25,000 companies in 90 countries. For the past six years, FORTUNE magazine named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America. Readers may obtain investment information from the company's investor relations department by calling 512-683-5090, by sending e-mail to  nati@ni.com or by visiting  www.ni.com/nati.

LabVIEW, National Instruments, NI, NI-488.2, NI-DAQ and ni.com are trademarks of National Instruments. Other product and company names listed are trademarks or trade names of their respective companies.

Contacts 
 National Instruments, AustinEditor Contact: Jennifer Howard-Brown, 512-683-8713orReader Contact: Ernest Martinez, 800-258-7022