At 06:14 AM 9/27/97 +0000, you wrote: The Nioclet 290 is a dedicated instrument controller and data acquisition computer made by Nicolet Instrument Corp. in Madison, Wisconsin. Nicolet is a major manufacturer of Fourier transform (FT) infrared spectrometers, and at one time also manufactured FT Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectrometers. I have one of the 290's great-grandchildren, the NIC 660, still operating a FTIR spectrometer in my lab. My system was purchased new in 1986, and is still running reasonably well. I don't know a lot about the 290, but what I can tell you about these computers in general is that they are essentially totally proprietary platforms that were designed and built from the ground up to control FTIR and FT NMR instrumentation and process spectral data. The design of the systems were optimized to handle fast Fourier transformation of spectoscopy data "on-the-fly" as it came off of the spectrometer. These computers use a proprietary operating system written by Nicolet (NICOS) which is somewhat Forth-like but has a user shell running on top. The user shell bears some resemblance to Unix. The 660 system I have has applications software for IR spectroscopy, some text editors, and compilers for Fortran, Basic, and Pascal. Nicolet stopped manufacturing these computers and switched over to PC's about 3-5 years ago, but still maintains some limited support (ie, parts and supplies) for these proprietary machines.