Sorry folks for delayed response. Out on vacation.
My $0.02 about having a virtual instrumentation solution would be the following:
GPIB is a standard, and any device would work. USB GPIB devices are very nice. There are also ethernet devices that can be connected to from any PC, and are also very nice. There are PCI devices which would suit our purposes IMO, even ISA devices. The GPIB bus can control many devices as the bus can be daisy chained (more devices than we would probably ever have a need to control simultaneously). So if we can put our hands on any GPIB device, we can make it work. We will need GPIB cables, though.
As for a machine, I recommend a Win 7 or later system, 250GB HD or more, and lots of screen geometry. There are lots of plotting options and the choicest programming environment is a graphical programming language, so its best to provide a large amount of pixels to work with. I would choose a high res display OR two lower res displays if I got everything I wanted in such a system. Also, NI softtware products tend to be resource hogs so its good to have healthy RAM, 4GB+ ideal.
Again, apologies for being out of pocket, but I like the enthusiasm, and hope we are able to advance tool capabilities of the Space harnessing the power of the PC and easily customizable high level programming.
Hope this helpsā¦