  Pachmarhi Array of \v Cerenkov Telescopes (PACT) consists of a 5$\times$5
array of \v Cerenkov telescopes deployed over an area of 100 $m$ $\times$ 80
$m$, in the form of a rectangular matrix. The experiment is based on
atmospheric \v Cerenkov technique using wavefront sampling technique. Each
telescope consists of 7 parabolic mirrors mounted para-axially on an equatorial
mount. At the focus of each mirror a fast phototube is mounted. In this
experiment a large number of parameters have to be measured and recorded from
each of the 175 phototubes in the shortest possible time. Further, the counting
rates from each phototube as well as the analog sum of the 7 phototubes from
each telescope (royal sum) need to be monitored at regular intervals during the
run. In view of the complexity of the system, the entire array is divided into
four smaller sectors each of which is handled by an independent field signal
processing centre (FSPC) housed in a control room that collects, processes and
records information from nearby six telescopes that belong to that sector. The
distributed data acquisition system (DDAS) developed for the purpose consists
of stand-alone sector data acquisition system (SDAS) in each of the four FSPC's
and a master data acquisition system (MDAS). MDAS running in the master signal
processing centre (MSPC) records data from each of the 25 telescopes. The data
acquisition and monitoring PCs (SDAS and MDAS) are networked through LAN. The
entire real time software for DDAS is developed in C under $linux$ environment.
Most of the hardware in DDAS are designed and fabricated in-house. The design
features and the performance of the entire system along with some other
auxiliary systems to facilitate the entire observations will be presented.
