\section{Initial Remark}

This manual accompanies the initial release of the LINK system, an environment
for combinatorial computing.  The system is useful not only as a 
collection of C++ libraries, but as an computing environment for manipulating
and visualizing graphs and hypergraphs.  It is menu driven for accessibility
and includes a Scheme command-line interface for power and flexibility.
This Scheme interface is based on Erick Gallesio's STk package~\cite{eg95},
so LINK inherits all of STk's functionality.  Some examples of this include
regular expression processing and socket objects; however, no STk 
functionality will be discussed in this manual.  See the STk 
manual~\cite{eg95} for details.

{\em All of the coding examples in this manual were included via automatic 
mechanisms which run the code and produce \LaTeX output.}  This first
release includes many examples and lists of methods without
much textual description.  The manual will continue to fill out during the
first few years of public LINK usage, and updates will be included with
subsequent releases.

\section{Forward}

The high-level plan for LINK was conceived discussed by
the four primary investigators:  {\em Nathanial Dean}, 
{\em Mark Goldberg}, {\em Greg
Shannon}, and {\em Steven Skiena}.  They established guidelines 
describing the system's capabilities~\cite{tr95}, 
obtained the necessary funding and
assembled the teams responsible for the implementation.  The coordinator
of the project, and one of the primary designers and developers is
Dr. Jonathan Berry.

This version of LINK is not in the public domain, but can be used freely
for research and teaching.  Users should be aware of the
copyright agreements of the various software packages which it uses.

This version of LINK has been partially funded by NSF grant CCR-9214487 and
ONR award 400x116yip01.

Questions and comments should be addressed to Jonathan W. Berry,
the project coordinator, at berryj@dimacs.rutgers.edu

LINK is a cooperative project of DIMACS, Los Alamos National Laboratory,
Indiana University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,
and The State University of New York at Stony Brook.

The many people who have 
contributed to the LINK effort are listed on page~\pageref{sec:ack}.