These programs were originally developed on a UNIX workstation.
Consequently, the programming philosophy is heavily influenced
by the UNIX operating system. All the programs have command line options which
mimic those of regular UNIX commands. We have added interactive menus so as
to make the programs more user friendly on
Macintoshes and PCs running
Microsoft Windows
.
There are a number of different programs in the package rather than one program that does everything. In this way, each program does a small job, and the user can combine the programs as a group to do a complete analysis. The user can examine the input and output files for each step and have a better idea of what the programs are doing. All input and output files are plain ASCII text. They can be transferred to any platform and viewed or edited there.
We have also been influenced by the Free Software Foundation in that we charge no fee for this program package. We have attempted to integrate these programs with other free software (most notably Gnuplot and Mapmaker/EXP).