[0xTJ]

I finished my Master's a couple years ago, and in our IC probing lab, it was almost all GPIB. All of the pieces of test equipment, except for a single cutting-edge Keysight scope (which used Ethernet instead), were connected together via those chunky but satisfying and robust cables, usually controlled via MATLAB or some other IC measurement software package.

[xyphro]

Yes, those cables are often called "garden hose cables". The only benefit of that bus infrastructure under a nowadays view is that it gives the ability to synchronously trigger multple instruments which is very rarely used or required.