As a personal retrospective of my use of computers (in chemistry), the Macintosh plays a subtle role.
Apple, bless their hearts, distributed a control panel called MacTCP, and after I figured out what it all meant (network masks, Class C subnets and the like) I let everyone know that another network device had been added to join the laserprinter. Few IBM PC owners could boast this. At this stage, in truth, there was not that much people could connect to. Using MacTelnet, we could indeed access CAS Online, and print the search to a laserprinter. Using MacFTP, we could get files remotely from other FTP servers, and we started to acquire coordinate files for our molecular modelling. This in turn brought the realisation that the existing formats (Brookhaven protein databank files were the most common at the time) were not ideally suited for the purpose, and this could be seen as another spark for the CML (XML) work that started about nine years later. I also remember discovering that Apple computer ran their own FTP server, where I could download the latest operating system disk images (Systems 5-7 as I recollect were obtained from this site ). Things were free (but not always that easy) in those days. Our Macs ended up have the latest OS on them (in other words, they tended to crash a little less) almost as soon as it was released (and the Mac app store™, with its impending 4.6 Gbyte of OS X Lion about to be downloaded is merely the latest example of this).
This post focuses on a very short period, because I wanted to get across how (in my mind at least) chemistry became globally networked for the (chemical) masses (or at least those with Apple Macintosh computers!), and the role the laserprinter Pippa played in this development.
In the mid to late 1990s as the Web developed, it was becoming more obvious…
I have written a few times about the so-called "anomeric effect", which relates to stereoelectronic…
The recent release of the DataCite Data Citation corpus, which has the stated aim of…
Following on from my template exploration of the Wilkinson hydrogenation catalyst, I now repeat this…
In the late 1980s, as I recollected here the equipment needed for real time molecular…
On 24th January 1984, the Macintosh computer was released, as all the media are informing…
View Comments