> ISA slot Good luck finding one of those. It's been well over a decade since systems switched to PCI. > desktop-equivalent If a Raspberry Pi [1] doesn't ha

> ISA slot Good luck finding one of those. It's been well over a decade since systems switched to PCI. > desktop-equivalent If a Raspberry Pi [1] doesn't have enough horsepower for you, the Kickstarter-funded Parallella project [2], currently shipping prototypes, will offer a dual-core ARM main processor and a 16- or 64-core Epiphany Multicore Accelerator. If you still want a desktop, I don't know a thing about hardware, but I've heard that parallel/serial ports are easy to use for people who do. So maybe you should look into building your hardware for the parallel/serial port (and using a USB adapter since most modern systems don't have them onboard)? Of course, AFAIK serial ports max out at 115200 bits/second, so if you need a faster I/O rate for your application, look into USB, Ethernet, or PCI. [1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs [2] http://www.parallella.org/board/ http://www.parallella.org/board/