“There was no doubt that this was going to change the way chemists interact with each other and the rest of the scientific community,” he says. “The impact of seeing ChemDraw on a Macintosh computer was dramatic and immediate,” he says. Schreiber holds the distinction of being the first person to purchase ChemDraw. Schreiber, then a chemistry professor at Yale University, saw the demo and recalls “knowing instantly that my prized drafting board and my obsessive drafting of chemical formulas were over.” Bad weather kept the conferees indoors, so attendance was high. Rubenstein and the Evanses demonstrated it during a break in the conference. In July of 1985, ChemDraw premiered at the Gordon Research Conference on Reactions & Processes in New Hampshire. The program developed little by little in this manner, with Sally channeling the needs of chemists and Rubenstein doing the programming. And this is exactly what happened every time an organic chemist saw it in action: (The sharpened stick would have worked pretty well with those rub-on letter transfers). It was a lot closer to that then it was to ChemDraw, that's for sure.
As I've always said, it was, in retrospect, not too far off from incising a buffalo-dung tablet with a sharpened stick and leaving it in the sun to dry. And you Frankensteined each scheme together with tape (matte, not shiny) or glue stick to make The Final Copy, rolling it into the typewriter to put in the captions and the text over the arrows. If you wanted to copy a structure, well, you went down to the copier and you copied that structure. For my second-year continuation exam, I had to do the structures the classic way: green plastic template to make the chair and boat cyclohexanes all come out the same, rub-on letters for the atoms. Here's a look back at the beginnings of ChemDraw, and you won't be surprised to hear that its origins go back to someone (Dave Evans' wife!) who'd had way too much of the old-fashioned style of structure drawing.Īs I've mentioned here before, my grad school experience ended up being timed to experience both worlds.
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