I suspect that the majority of my readers have no experience in drawing chemical structures by hand for publication purposes. That’s because of one software product: ChemDraw. I remember using the Fieser triangle (unfortunately no longer sold by Aldrich – click to see a pic and product description!), a plastic template that had standard-sized rings, like nice pentagons and hexagons, and chair and boat conformations of cyclohaxane, and you’d take your fancy ink pen and careful follow the template. Then you moved the template to draw say a bond off of the ring and hoped to god that the ink didn’t smudge. There were other templates for drawing letters and numbers – or you used scratch-off transfer decals. (By this point all of you under 40 are thinking “what the hell is he talking about?”)
Well all of that changed with three seminal events for organic chemists: the introduction of the original Macintosh computer, the introduction of the Apple LaserWriter and the introduction of ChemDraw. The Mac allowed one to sketch in a much more intuitive way – again for those less than 50, computers use to come without a mouse! Imagine trying to draw a chemical structure using a keyboard. That’s why there were no structure drawing tools prior to the Mac. The LaserWriter meant that you could print an output that looked as good as what you had on the screen, and could thus be submitted for publication. And ChemDraw – well this was just astonishing! I still remember the day during my post-doc when the Mac and LaserWriter arrived and we launched ChemDraw and were able to quickly draw molecules – steroid, and conformations, and stereoisomers and they all looked beautiful and we could get them done in a flash!
When I started my first academic position at Northern Illinois University in August 1987 I purchased a Mac and a LaserWriter and ChemDraw as part of my start-up – and I was the first in the department to have a Mac – but that changed rapidly!
So, why all of the teary reminiscences? Well David Evans has just published1 a nice romp through the mid-1980s recalling how Stewart Rubinstein, aided by Evans and his wife, developed ChemDraw and started CambridgeSoft, and as Stuart Schreiber says “ChemDraw changed the field in a way that has not been replicated since.”
Today, there are other chemical structure drawing tools available, and in fact I no longer use ChemDraw, but it is still a wonder to be able to create drawings so easily and so nicely. Maybe one day I’ll reminisce about the day I got EndNote and my life changed again!
References
1) Evans, D. A. “History of the Harvard ChemDraw Project,” Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2014, 53, 1521-3773, DOI 10.1002/anie.201405820.
Henry Rzepa responded on 13 Oct 2014 at 4:49 am #
I would add to Steve’s fond reminiscences. Chemdraw came out in 1984. By 1985, where I work at Imperial College, we had purchased Chemdraw for about 15 Macs, all sharing one laserwriter (which was by far the most expensive component). Since our dept had two buildings, printing for many of us involved a walk to another building. I decided to network the two buildings together using Appletalk (and some wonderful routers called Webster Multigates). Almost by accident, our need to share the expensive printer brought to these 15 Macs the side benefit of the Internet. The Mac’s printer/Appletalk port was also the “wide-area-network” port! Installed with Telnet for Mac, we could roam the world! Specifically, STN online, which was how Chemical Abstracts first went online in 1981 I think. (Oh, and I almost forgot, email using another wonderful program called Eudora). Those 15 Macs were the envy of the dept, not because they could laserprint, but because they were amongst the first computers to benefit from the Internet (IBM PCs in those days needed an expensive additional network card, that few fitted).
And whilst we are taking of Stewart Rubinstein, I would also thank his brother Michael. It was he who produced a sister program called Chem3D in 1985. It was wonderfully easy to use, it supported geometry minimisations using mechanics and MOPAC, and introduced a lot of people to molecular modelling. Remember that in 1985, modelling programs ran only on very expensive high-end graphics workstations (the Evans and Sutherlands, the Silicon Graphics etc), but Chem3D introduced modelling to the masses so to speak. So thanks not just to Stewart but to Michael!
Henry Rzepa responded on 13 Oct 2014 at 5:08 am #
A follow-up thought. Steve muses about influential programs that changed our lives, mentioning e.g. EndNote.
Thinking about one program that I must have purchased around 1985 and still use daily, it has to be BBedit. Why? It is, after all, “just” a bare-bones-editor. But it soon came with a plugin called Tidy which is used to validate HTML and I started writing HTML with it. In 1995-96, both Steve and I were organising virtual conferences (ECCC and ECTOC), and I “edited” submissions to ECTOC using BBedit. I still use it to write my conference slides and presentations (I think I am probably the only person left in the world who does NOT use Powerpoint). It is hard-wired into my brain.
I can see a theme emerging here. Perhaps others can post their own favourite (chemical) software from the 1980s?
Mike Harmata responded on 14 Oct 2014 at 8:51 pm #
Just bumped into the blog after looking for your book, part of which I read while hanging out with Peter Schreiner last month. Well, my Rapido pens are history; stencils I still have (and I still have a slide rule from high school!!). Chemdraw was indeed a revolution, but drawing had its moments. STN and Scifinder are a blessing and a curse. I’ve gained 20+ pounds for not having to go the the library and do things by hand….