Charm physics at Fermilab E791

Experiment 791 at Fermilab's Tagged Photon Laboratory has just accumulated a high statistics charm sample by recording 20 billion events on 24000 8mm tapes. A 500 GeV/c π- beam was used with a fixed target and a magnetic spectrometer which now includes 23 silicon microstrip planes for vertex reconstruction. A new data acquisition system read out 9000 events/sec during the part of the Tevatron cycle that delivered beam. Data was buffered in eight large FIFO memories to allow continuous event building and continuous tape writing to a wall of 42 Exabytes at 9.6 MB/sec. Preliminary results show D0→K-π+ and D+→K-π+π+ decays. Rarer decays will be pursued. (author) 16 refs.; 5 figs.; 1 tab