ACADEMIC LICENSING ARRANGEMENTS:
STING currently is licensed from Columbia for a fee of $500. This money goes to help development and distribution. The money needs to be in the form of a check made out to the "Department of Biochemistry, Columbia University", and sent to:

STING Licensing
Department of Biochemistry Rm 221
Columbia University Box 36
630, W. 168th st
New York, NY 10032.

The program will be given out free of charge to those who don't have research funding. The STING executable is accessible via anonymous ftp in encrypted form. CURRENT POLICY is to release the decryption keyword upon agreement to license by filling out the ORDER FORM NOT when the license or payment is received. If you have trouble accessing the order form you may e-mail sting_info@trantor.bioc.columbia.edu

INDUSTRY LICENSING:
Note that current policy on Industry License is the same as for Academic License except that there is no waiver of the fee of $500.

WHAT SYSTEMS STING RUNS ON:
STING-server has been tested and runs on most SGI machines since the Indigos, Indys, crimsons, gtxs, vgxs, extremes, reality engines, Onyx, O2 etc. Operating systems tested are irix 5.3 and 6.2.

STING can be accessed from SGI computers, as well as from PC stations running Windows95 and Windows NT. Reportedly, STING can be accessed by PowerMac computers too.

The user should have Netscape 4.03 or higher installed and Chime 1.0 for SGI stations (Chemscape Chime Version 2.0beta2 32bit, for PC stations).

RETRIEVING STING:
anonymous ftp to 156.111.96.30 (enter ftp as the user name, anything as password)
cd /pub/sting-l
get README
(ideally read README) and then get the files needed. Only the STING executables are encrypted (see above).

THE MANUAL:
Please consult: STING help pages.

STING REFERENCE
Please use the following reference in all articles which use STING. It would be particularly nice if reprints are also sent to the above address:

Goran Neshich, Roberto Togawa, Wellington Vilella and Barry Honig
"STING (Sequence To and withIN Graphics) PDB_Viewer"
Protein Data Bank Quaterly Newsletter , No.84, July 1998