International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 22-25, 2001 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / Distributed processing is coming to data acquisition. The desire for smart sensors that can preprocess data, is growing. Making sensors themselves intelligent will reverse the historic trend toward smaller and cheaper sensors. Incorporating current sensor technology into data acquisition nodes in a network will create a distributed data acquisition, DAQ, environment that can acquire data from around the world over the Internet. The future is now.