At the dawn of the Mac era, National Instruments developed a complete software-based system that automates laboratory instrumentation and data acquisition. That took quite a leap of marketing faith — who could have foreseen that a computer whose main software offerings were MacWrite and MacPaint would someday he a major force in labs? That faith paid off; today the Macintosh is the most important platform in several scientific fields, including molecular biology and chemistry, and National Instruments’ LabView is the dominant program for developing virtual instrumentation.
Not only is LabView the biggest of the lab software packages — the full Power Mac installation of version 4.0 needs 8MB of RAM and nearly 70MB of disk space — it's without question the most capable. With LabView and a data-acquisition card, your Mac can simulate any other lab information-gathering devices, from lock-in amplifiers to multichannel scopes to timers and controllers. And National Instruments has modernized the programming environment to look like a professional development package, arranging program sections hierarchically and adding dozens of aids for producing virtual instruments (VIs).
Although the amount of programming you now must do to implement specific VIs looks more daunting than in the last version, LabView 4.0's customizable floating palettes let you use existing VIs from the giant (300MB) library provided to create customized VIs to meet your lab's requirements (see “Post It!").
Amazingly, even with all the programming changes between versions 3.1 and 4.0, I was able to open and run all 18 items in my test suite of LabView 3.1 VI packages with no glitches (the cures tor the few potential conversion problems are carefully explained in the documentation).
Version 4.0 resolves the odd priming bugs that plagued previous versions. Its graphing features rival those of dedicated scientific graphing programs, and tip messages appear like balloon help in little boxes near every important screen element. The Analysis library’s math functions are now so comprehensive that you could set up LabView to manage a modest magnetic-resonance imaging effort. And the new Profiler lets you track down time sinks in your LabView projects. For network-oriented projects that involve analyzing lots of data from multiple instruments, this capability is crucial.
My misgivings about version 4.0 have more to do with the inevitable consequences of LabView’s relentless evolution than with flaws in the program. You can now do real project-based programming, as you would in C++, but it won’t he obvious to new users how to get a simple job — such as basic data logging — going quickly. Also, the days when a five-year-old Mac could serve as an inexpensive data recorder have ended with this release; a Mac IIsi with 6MB of RAM is no longer a LabView-ready platform. The excellent tutorial helps remedy the first problem, and the increasing availability of inexpensive Performas with big hard drives will eventually rectify the second.
Seiter, Charles. (August 1996). LabView 4.0. Macworld. (pg. 67).
National Instruments
Applications
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LabVIEW_4.0_k.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
