The workstation and the ISS software will start automatically whenever the workstation powers up, either after being switched on or after a power failure. The system start-up is called a boot, short for bootstrapping, from the phrase "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps". The system essentially bootstraps itself by using a small "boot loader" program to load enough of the system that it knows how to run the rest of the system.

During the boot process, the system displays messages about its progress on the console. Once the system has finished booting, it automatically logs in as the iss user and displays the graphical desktop. At this point, even though nothing is being displayed on the desktop, the whole system is operational and ready for continuous running. The ISS ingest and data management processes run behind the scenes without requiring any user intervention, since the system needs to be able to recover from a power failure while no operators are present to help it out.

Once logged into the system, the iss user should not log out unless the ISS system needs to be restarted! Logout automatically stops all the ISS programs which were started on boot and which run in the background, including data collection programs, not just the programs with window interfaces. This allows an operator to restart the ISS software, particularly data ingest routines, just by logging out and logging back in, without rebooting the workstation. Normally, there is never a need to log out once logged in—only if a restart is needed.

To start the graphical monitoring programs, double-click on the ISS Display. This starts several processes, including the Zebra graphical plot windows, the Event Logger, and the mozilla web browser. If any of the individual programs are already running, then they are not restarted, so it is safe to click the icon at any time, especially to restart a program which has exited.