The Isaac Newton Group (ING) operates UK telescopes on La Palma in the Canary Islands. During the late 1990s the ING set out to migrate the legacy, VAX-based control systems on the 4.2 William Herschel Telescope (WHT) to newer, Unix-based systems.

Observatory Sciences developed networked, cross-platform software as part of a new data acquisition system to enable data acquired from the existing VAX control systems to be incorporated in the data files of the new system.