A few years ago, we published an article which drew a formal analogy between chemistry and iTunes (sic )[cite]10.1021/ci060139e[/cite]. iTunes was the first really large commercial digital music library, and a feature under-the-skin was the use of meta-data to aid discoverability of any of the 10 million (26M in 2013) or so individual items in the store. ‡ The analogy to digital chemistry and discoverability of
Steve Jobs death on October 5th 2011 was followed by a remarkable number of tributes and reflections on the impact the company he founded has had on the world. Many of these tributes summarise the effect as a visionary disruption . Here I describe from my own perspective some of the disruptions to chemistry I experienced (for another commentary, see here). Chemical diagram, circa 1983.
If you get a small rotatable molecule below, then ChemDoodle/HTML5/WebGL is working. Why might this be important? Well, the future is mobile, in other words, devices that rely on batteries or other sources of built-in power. This means the power guzzling GPU cards of the past (some reach ~400 Watts!) cannot be used.
For those of us who were around in 1985, an important chemical IT innovation occurred. We could acquire a computer which could be used to draw chemical structures in one application, and via a mysterious and mostly invisible entity called the clipboard , paste it into a word processor (it was called a Macintosh). Perchance even print the result on a laserprinter.
