International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 21, 2002 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / Because modern data acquisition systems use digital backplanes, it is logical for more and more data processing to be done in each Data Acquisition Unit (DAU) or even in each module. The processing related to an analog acquisition module typically takes the form of digital signal conditioning for range adjust, linearization and filtering. Some of the advantages of this are discussed in this paper. The next stage is powerful processing boards within DAUs for data reduction and third-party algorithm development. Once data is being written to and from powerful processing modules an obvious next step is networking and decom-less access to data. This paper discusses some of the issues related to these types of processing.