The Gist specification language emerged at USC/ISI from more than five years of research into the development of operational specification languages and environments. We designed and implemented a Gist processor through extensive utilization of language development tools and a relational database management system available in a UNIX environment. We describe the architecture of this UNIX-based Gist language processor and investigate the process of system specification by examining usage of Gist language constructs in specifying nine software projects. This paper provides a preliminary empirical assessment of the system specification effort using Gist, and outlines directions for enhancements to the processor. To our knowledge, this is the first such analysis of a formal specification language.