[daip] AIPS Data Importing

[Eric Greisen]

Unfortunately, the two kinds of computers have different binary
formats and one cannot simply copy the data from one to the other.
Your former computer is similar to SUN Solaris machines and your
current one, not suprisingly, is like Linux Intel machines.  I wish
you had asked this question in advance, because we would then have
told you to run procedures we provide to make a large number of FITS
files (on tape or disk) which then could be read by any computer.

Those procs are in RUN WRTPROCS and the most useful ones are WRTDISK
and READISK.  It would probably be cheaper to return to your old
machine, run WRTDISK, carry the output media to your new machine, and
run READISK rather than attempt to recompute everything (time is money
after all).  In AIPS, we have resisted writing a program to convert
between byte orders without using FITS.  It would require a program to
understand in detail the binary format of every possible file type in
AIPS and for it to remain current.  In fact it is worse than that in
that AIPS has for many years self-corrected for changes in formats.
If you were trying to translate on your current machine, it could not
do that self correction and would instead translate incorrectly unless
we really built the program well.  I probably could write such a
program, but it would take more time than you want to wait even if I
had free time.

Eric Greisen