During my PhD research project in experimental physics I needed some fast (~200 microsec. resolution) Digital IO, but there was not enough money to buy a NI card with onboard memory. We did have an older NI card (PCI-6024E) with several DIO lines. I then used the drivers from the Comedi project [www.comedi.org] in combination with the RTAI real time kernel [www.rtai.org] to write a program that clocked out the desired timeing with approximately 20 microsec. resolution. So if you don't want LabVIEW, but do want OSS drivers for your NI card, comedi is the way. Of course, this means you'll have to program in C.

The interesting thing is the Glauber, the american scientist, was awarded 1/2 of the prize money (approx. 1.1 Million Euro), while Hänsch, from Germany, and Hall, from America, had to share the other half.
That's because they wanted to award equal shares for theoretical and experimental physics. Hall & Haensch are experimentalists.