The VISTA program is generally stared with the command
assuming that it has been installed somewhere which is found in your
command path.
VISTA will respond with a 'welcome' message and a prompt. The welcome message, if it is long, comes out a screen at a time. Hit 'return' at the end of each page to keep reading a message. Hit anything else to go on. The program will then give you a prompt ( GO: ). The prompt tells you that the program is ready to execute a command. Type a command you want, and hit RETURN. When the command is completed, the prompt will reappear. If you type a command that VISTA does not recognize, it will say so.
VISTA is a rather large program, you may need access to a reasonably large amount of physical and virtual memory.
On startup, VISTA can also be instructed to run a designated procedure. This is a convenient feature which allows you to customize your VISTA environment. Use the environment variable V_STARTUP to specify the name of the file containing the procedure you want executed as the program begins. Typically this procedure will define aliases or set the values of variables. Read the section on procedures (HELP PROCEDURE) for more information.
Some additional symbols which also can (or need to ) be defined in environment variables for use on startup: