QUESTION:
What kind of computers (hardware and software) do you use up there? 

REPLY from Walter Miller on November 11, 1995:
I am the engineering manager of the hardware development group, and I was
a participant on the LFS flights to and from Houston last month. 

The computers currently onboard the KAO are 
all Sun SPARCstation1 and SPARCstation1+ workstations which are tied
together via Ethernet.   These machines were installed several years
ago as part of ADAMS upgrade.  ADAMS stands for Airborne Data Acquisition
and Management System.  There are five workstations altogether: a server,
the Mission Director workstation, the Telescope Operator workstation, and
two Data Analysis workstations (for use by the PIs).  They all run SunOS.
The computer operators display is run by the KAO server.  There are two
separate Ethernets onboard.  One is dedicated for use by the PIs in case
they want a "private" network not cluttered by the facility data traffic.
The MD (Mission Director) runs a custom logging program which is used 
to enter realtime comments into the flight log.  A custom flight planning
program called KNAV is available to replan the flight if changes are 
necessary in the air.  Various UNIX utilities are used on all of the 
workstations.  The experimenters bring their own computers for control
of their instrument and data collection.  Over the years we have seen
all sorts of PI computers, from Sparcstations to PCs and Commodore64s.
All of the background facility housekeeping data collection is done by
a number of custom microprocessor based boxes which feed their data into
a terminal server which in turn talks to a custom realtime VME data
concentrator called the Facility Interface (FI).  The FI can be 
interrogated over the Ethernet by the PI team via a simple script
language we call the Facility Command Language (FCL).  The FI provides
houskeeping engineering data and allows the PI to control the telescope,
but all of the science data is collected by the PI computer and stored
on their own disks and tapes.

Regards,
Walter Miller