Bruce Hathaway

In the mid 80's, we had purchased an Atari home computer, that I used to write exams, but had to hand draw all of the chemical structures. I found a program (I don't remember the name) that remapped the keyboard so I could draw chemical structures, somewhat crudely, until I bought a Macintosh and Chemintosh in the early nineties.

Dylan Bleier

Drawing large 3D organic molecules without ChemDraw is brutal and slow.

Robert Topper

I was one of the graduate students at Yale that benefited from Stu Schreiber's early buyin to ChemDraw. There was a copy which could be used at a common terminal, a Mac Plus, in the NMR lab, with even (gasp) a *laser printer.* As a physical chemist, ChemDraw might not seem all that essential to me - but its arrow templates were a huge boon. I was able to use CD to make complex chemical reaction kinetics schemes, and my first contribution to the literature was a scheme I made for a paper by Nelson DeLeon and Clay Marston (J. Chem. Phys. 91, 3405 (1989)). Thanks, ChemDraw!

Nick Greeves

I've used Chem(Bio)Draw since 1988 coauthoring two editions of a textbook on Organic Chemistry and a website ChemTube3D http://www.chemtube3d.com using the software. I was also a beta tester for many years. I can recall the use of Rotring pens and Letraset but I prefer using my Macs to produce vector graphics. Thanks Stewart and CambridgeSoft!

Bruce Hathaway

In the mid 80's, we had purchased an Atari home computer, that I used to write exams, but had to hand draw all of the chemical structures. I found a program (I don't remember the name) that remapped the keyboard so I could draw chemical structures, somewhat crudely, until I bought a Macintosh and Chemintosh in the early nineties.

Sanjay Batra

Drawing the chemical structures before we started using ChemDraw was little cumbersome. Being good in arts and drawing I quickly learnt the art of drawing the chemical structures using the templates and Stredler pen. Although placing the structures symmetrically was an issue I resolved it by placing two templates perpendicular to each other. The bigger problem arose when the structures were to be incorporated in the thesis because their placement required appropriate space in a document being typed on electronic typewriter. As there were little option to resize the structures we either drew the structure sitting next to the typist or saw to it that all schemes were placed on a separate page. Slide making was also difficult as the option to color them as per the requirement was not possible. How cheers to ChemDraw as all these issues are things of past now

Ganesan Vaidyanathan

Yes, some time using draftsmen and then with rub off stencils sold by Aldrich, which is what I used for my Ph.D. Thesis. What a long way we have come. ChemDraw was an integral part of the work we did and continues to be.

David Nehrkorn

Yes I do! I used Version 1 on my Mac in the mid 80's. Before ChemDraw, there was no suitable application. For my Ph.D. thesis, finished in 1974, I had a friend of mine who was a graphic artist draw the structures.

William Feld

As a student in J.K. Stille's group in the mid 60's, I made a lot of cash drawing structures for many theses. I used KOH-I-NOOR Rapidograph pens and lettering set (still available) and a plastic template that had various shapes cut into it. Later, I used a template designed by D. Seyferth and distributed by Alpha/Ventron. All of these templates had to have a set of spacers connected to the back of them to keep ink from the pens from running under the template. The advent of computer based drawing programs changed a lot but still do not prevent strange choices of fonts, spacing and placement on pages.

Robert Buntrock

Educated in the late '50s and mid '60s, structures for "finished" work or theses were drawn with hetero atoms typed in. Fortunately Princeton then allowed theses to be photocopied from typed manuscripts which made life easier for my wife (who typed my thesis) and I. We used additional stencils with a wider variety of polygons than Fieser's template. My need for drawing structures dropped off rapidly when I regretfully left the lab but I welcomed the excellent package from STNExpress, good for searching CA on STN (which I didn't have to do that often since I typically searched "simpler" molecules. I have an aged version of ChemDraw (from a review of CS ChemOffice) which I should update.

Donald Boyd

ChemDraw played a pivotal role in changing the negative attitude many bench chemists had toward computers in the 1980s. See "How Computational Chemistry Became Important in the Pharmaceutical Industry," Reviews in Computational Chemistry, Wiley-VCH, 2007, Vol. 23, pp. 401-451.

Lloyd Goding

I still have my 'Fieser triangle'; I keep it with my sliderule.

Richard Laursen

Dave Evans is quoted as saying, “Writing the program was no big deal. If we hadn’t done it, in a few years somebody would have done it.” It would have been less than a few years. In early 1985 one of my graduate students, Hann-Bin Chuang, at Boston University, developed and copyrighted a similar program, which he called CSD2D, using a DEC PDP-11 (I think). He used this program to write his own Ph.D. thesis. He also interfaced the computer with various instruments to produce computer-generated spectra for his thesis. All this is routine these days, but it was not then.

Katherine Flynn

I believe a group of us in the Agricultural Chemicals Division at Rohm & Haas in Springhouse, PA in the mid-1980's simply got together at lunch one day and drew up a proposal to purchase a MAC and ChemDraw as a common use computer and program for all. Of course, it was immediately useful and popular. What simple days before complicated IT processes to evaluate new software!

Glenn Howes

After Stu retired, I was responsible for keeping ChemBioDraw running on Mac at CambridgeSoft for several years. One thing about ChemDraw users. They are perfectionists and will notice if an atom label is a pixel to the right or if a bond truncated wrong.

Tom Zebovitz

ChemDraw was the procrastinator's friend. Minutes before I was scheduled to present my research at group meeting, I'd be on my first gen Mac, dashing off the appropriate structures. Often I could modify a talk I'd given earlier, since usually, not a ton happened over the past two weeks. The only bugaboo was that the older Mac I was using, mainly because I was one of the newer employees at my company, was very slow, and if I hit a certain key, the thing would redraw the screen excruciatingly slowly.

Ratna surya alwi

As a Ph.D student in material science, kanazawa univ. Japan. I used ChemDraw for made a paper and for a Ph.D. Thesis. Drawing organic structure without ChemDraw was complicated and too slow. Thanks ChemDraw,Stewart and CambridgeSoft!

Ratna surya alwi

As a Ph.D student in material science, Kanazawa Univ. Japan. I used ChemDraw for a paper and for a Ph.D. Thesis. Drawing organic structure without ChemDraw was complicated and too slow. Thanks ChemDraw, Stewart and CambridgeSoft!