A highly versatile and cost effective general purpose laboratory interface system is described. Used with a mini or microcomputer, it accepts data and issues commands to many laboratory instruments having digital inputs and outputs. This system can be constructed by a novice in electronics at minimal expense. Details of the hardware construction and software device handling are given. Also described is an application of this system towards performing several common laboratory tasks: collecting both rapidly and slowly varying analog data, and simultaneously plotting the data. An implementation that is directly applicable to the LSI‐11 minicomputer is described in detail.