Welcome to the Time-Of-Flight spectrometer FOCUS at SINQ! This manual describes how to operate FOCUS through the means of the instrument control software system SICS. SICS means: Sinq Instrument Control System. SICS is a client server system. This means there is a magic server program running somewhere which does all the work. The user interacts only with client applications which communicate with the server through the network. Most instument hardware (motor controllers, counter boxes etc.) is connected to the system through RS-232 serial connections. These RS-232 ports are connected to a Macintosh-PC which acts as a terminal server by means of a special program running on it. The SICS server communicates with this terminal server and other devices through the network.