CHAPTER 1    INTRODUCTION





                 Volume 3 of this manual is designed to provide  explanations

            of  the  functioning  of  the  individual  routines making up the

            package.  Beginning with Chapter 3,  descriptions  are  given  of

            several  general  purpose  routines  useful in data analysis, the

            MIIPS plotting routines, and the routines dealing  with  the  SAD

            disk  data format.  Subroutines which perform the various options

            available in MIIPS are not described here;  however,  expanations

            and  examples  of  their  action  are  given  in Volumes 2 and 3,

            respectively of this manual.  The higher  level  modules  are  in

            general  not  system dependent but the lower level routines which

            read from and write to devices,  are  specific  to  the  VAX  VMS

            operating  system.   MIIPS  has  not  been  ported  to  any other

            platforms since, in general, the available alternative  operating

            systems do not have features, such as extensible files, needed by

            MIIPS which are built into VMS.