Compression formats and utilities
This is the binary format defined and used by MATLAB, a commercial product from The MathWorks, Inc.. You will probably be unable to read these files without MATLAB.
The MathWorks home page is http://www.mathworks.com/.
Info-Zip compression software is available for many platforms, at no cost. To see whether you already have these utilities on your system type "zip -h" or, more pertinent, "unzip -h". If these utilities are present, you should receive a usage summary. If they are not present, you may want to get them. Please see http://quest.jpl.nasa.gov/Info-Zip/Info-Zip.html for more information.