Susan:

Great,  I'm glad you'll be using a Sun machine running Solaris.
Ok, a tar file of the IDL source for tgcmidl is in the hao (cedar)
directory ~tigcm/tgcmidl/tar, file name tgcmidl.tar. To install 
this on your home machine, you could do the following:

1. Make a directory called tgcmidl on your local home machine.
2. ftp the tgcmidl.tar file from hao to the new tgcmidl directory on 
   your home machine, and untar it (tar xf tgcmidl.tar).
3. Also ftp ~tigcm/tgcmidl/README and ~tigcm/tgcmidl/bin/tgcmidl 
   (csh run script) to the same local directory.
4. Change both TGCMIDL_DIR and TGCMIDL_MSO in the tgcmidl script from
   ~tigcm/tgcmidl and ~tigcm/tgcmidl/src/msis.so to ~/tgcmidl (i.e.,
   the same tgcmidl dir on the local machine.
5. Decide where you want to keep the netcdf data files, which are
   made from tgcm histories, and are read by tgcmidl. E.g., some
   scratch disk. Edit the startup.pro file accordingly.
   There are some sample netcdf files in /vishnu/d/tgcmdil/cdf
   you can ftp over and try reading.
6. Give the command "tgcmidl" to start the application.

In order to make new netcdf files you can use tgcmidl to make the
cray script (it will be called mkcdf.csh); submit that to
the cray from hao, and ftp the resulting netcdf file to your
home machine.

I'm sure I've left a lot of stuff out. Send mail or call when
you need help.

--Ben