I just read the Lava forum discussion per the link provided by tst. Very interesting. There were references to some old Fluke patents on Virtual Machines or Virtual Instrumentation.
A very long time ago, about 1986, I worked on a test system produced by a company then called Summation. A couple of years later, Summation was bought out by Fluke, who continued the product line for about 10 years. The product was a test system involving a chassis, VME backplane, test instruments on a plug in card (such as signal generator, DMM, DIO, and such). This was before VXI and way before PXI. The Virtual Front Panel was a graphical front panel of the instrument you wanted to control. For instance, you could set the DMM to read volts by selecting the function from a drop down menu box with your mouse. Test programs were written in a text based language called TestBasic. I worked on this system for about 3 years and became one of the few "experts" on it. Besides MS Windows, it was the first graphical test application I had ever seen, at least the virtual front panels were.. When VXI came out, Fluke's proprietary Summation equipment died down and they were forced to let it go. But at the time, it was the best thing on the market for manufacturing test.
I am wondering how many old guys like me are familiar with Summation and Virtual Front Panels.
