The Macintosh operating system is so easy to use that little instruction is necessary. You might want a copy of BBEdit Lite for viewing and editing text files, although any good word processor using fixed-width fonts would suffice. BBEdit Lite is freeware, can open large files (as long as you have the memory) and allows you to view and convert text files with DOS, UNIX or Macintosh line endings. Other free programs such as Fetch to download files, NiftyTelnet to access UNIX servers and Acrobat Reader to view and print documents are also useful.
The Macintosh version of the distribution will be unpacked into a folder called QTLCartMac containing subfolders bin, cbin, doc and example. The bin folder contains programs compiled for PowerPC Macintoshes that don't have the ability to run Carbon applications. The cbin folder contains programs that require the Carbon libraries. If you are running MacOS 10 or higher, then you should be able to use the programs in cbin.
As mentioned above, each program will update the qtlcart.rc file. You can rename this file for later use if you want to work with different data sets. We suggest that you create a working folder to hold all your data, and that specific data files have their own subfolders of this working folder. For this tutorial, create a folder qwork within the QTLCartMac folder. Create subfolders in the qwork folder called sim, mletest, realdat and sample. When doing the example using the mletest data, set the working directory to ::qwork:mletest using the menu the first program that you run and make sure that you have made copies of the mletest data files in the mletest subfolder.