INTRODUCTION

One of the more mysterious things when you begin at SEP is the computing environment. After a year or two you know how things work, but in the meantime you have probably spent many hours rewriting pre-existing code or struggling with fairly pedestrian software which is documented either cryptically, not at all, or in a location unknown to all but the documenter. This paper is an effort to minimize time sinks by giving a basic overview of the SEP computing environment, stating some of the `unwritten rules', and providing the answers or directions to the answers to common questions of new students.