http://bear.ras.ucalgary.ca/glen_home_page/radast/user/node5.html (Einblicke ins Internet, ~06/1995)
An attempt has been made to make these programs as general as possible regarding spacecraft-specific inputs. On-board pointing constraints are read in from ASCII files which can be easily modified using a text editor. The current inputs are those for the Radioastron spacecraft. Modification to reflect future changes to constraints for Radioastron or to represent constraints instead for VSOP can be implemented simply by editing the appropriate files.
A minumum of 450 kilobytes of free RAM is required to successfully run all programs (uvplot has the largest requirement). The programs will run only on CPU's of 80286 level or better along with a numeric co-processor is highly recommended. The software has been developed to take advantage of some protected mode features(i.e. up to 16 MB address space with expandeded memory) and so requires the 286(16 bit) minimun CPU rating. Screen graphics requires an Enhanced Graphics Adapter (EGA) of higher resolution driver (eg. VGA, super VGA). Although the programs will function with a monochrome screen, wide use if made of colour in all displays, and a colour display is therefore recommended. Table 1 contains a list of files on the distribution disk. All non-executable files are in ASCII format. The different sections of this manual have been made independent, so that it is relatively easy both to read the manual as a single document and to focus on particular sections that are of interest.
Other considerations: Since these particular programs were initially written in 1990 much has changed in the PC world. The top of the line PC's were 80386 machines with the 80486 just about to arrive. The average PC would either be a lower end 386 with 1-2 MB RAM or even a 286 with only 1 MB of memory and up to 60 MB of hard disk space. In the time that has elapsed the capabilities of the average PC has increased tremendously. The standard being a 486 with 33 MHz clock speed and 4 MB RAM and 260 MB hard disk space. With 486 machines now being the average machine and newer Pentium's possessing the power of the older SUN Sparc workstations. This software will run much more quickly and with more features on simultaneously then was initially designed into the programs.
It is with this in mind that one must remember that these programs are not optimized to run very quickly by today's computing standards. Especially programs like uvplot which are designed with the assumption that limited memory and disk resources are available. This design will allow most of these programs to run on 80286 machines. Because of the recent "upgrade" of this software we cannot run in what is termed "real" mode but must run in "protected" mode. This will limit the base of PC's to anything with a 80286 processor or higher. This is not a bad limitation since most serious scientific users will have migrated to at least a 386 machine by now. However it is strongly recommended that the user have a 80287 or 80387 math coprocessor to improve performance since these programs are heavily floating point dependent. Though not absolutely vital since coprocessor emulation has been compiled into the executables but the programs will run much slower.
A good strategy to adopt when using these programs (regardless of the PC's clock speed) is to do some preliminary runs on screen only. When doing these runs use only the minimum time step needed to get a coarse picture of the model. When a Postscript hardcopy is desired then settings can be changed to a higher time resolution. This will save a lot of time plus will not consume very much of the computer's resources. In the case of uvplot which has several added features(i.e. FITS file generation plus added gaussian noise; see sections 5.3.5 and 5.10 for more information) the best course to choose is to run one feature at a time. Although hard disk space size has increased 10 fold in the last 5 years these programs do not as a rule use large (approximately 8 MB) amounts of disk. The only option which needs even this amount of space (temporarily) is uvplot with the FITS file generation option turned on and only on a fine time step of 1 minute.
Additionally, these programs can be executed under a DOS emulator or even as DOS window in MS Windows 3.1. Once can create a program group and assign icons to each program although these programs are not Windows programs. Expect that this will consume more time then if the software were run in DOS mode alone.
Table 1: Contents of distribution disk