Characteristics of the 2MASS prototype survey

The 2 Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) will catalog over 100,000,000 individual objects, the vast majority of which will be stars of spectral type K and Inter. For many projects it will be important to develop techniques to identify interesting objects within this data set. The combination of near-IR and visible light observations will be a powerful tool for finding objects from brown dwarfs to dust-enshrouded quasars. This paper describes prototype hardware and software systems used as part of the preparation for the 2MASS survey. Three years of observations with prototype systems have produced a database of more than 1 million objects. A companion paper describes the comparison of these data with optical plate material and visible spectroscopic observations resulting in the discovery of a quasar with a redshift of 0.147.