There has been a small revolution in data acquisition systems for scientific use in recent years. It was not so long ago that hardware and processing power were expensive. and software nonexistent. Every program had to be written from scratch in a low-level language and, if you did not want your program all night to run, it usually included large chunks of assembler code as well. Nowadays there are many data acquisition systems to choose from, with good hardware and vastly improved software running on fast personal computers
