On Tuesday, February 08, 2011 11:47:04 pm Dale Tronrud wrote:
> I see in the news that Ken Olsen has died. Although he was
> not a crystallographer I think we should stop for a moment to
> remember the profound impact the company that this man founded
> had on our field.
>
> My first experience in a crystallography lab was as an undergraduate
> in M. Sundaralingam's lab in Madison Wisconsin. While I never had
> the opportunity to use them, his two diffractometers were controlled
> by the ubiquitous PDP-8 computers. I had more experience with his
> main computer, which was either a PDP-11/34 or 35
> (Ethan help me out!).
http://skuld.bmsc.washington.edu/people/merritt/graphics/madgraph/pdp11.html
> This was connected to a Vector General graphics display running software
> called UWVG.
http://skuld.bmsc.washington.edu/people/merritt/graphics/madgraph/madgraph.html
> Having the least stature in the lab I got the midnight
> to 4am time slot for model building. The computer took about 10
> minutes to compute and contour each block of map, covering about
> three residues. While waiting I would crawl under the DECwriter and
> nap.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Decwriter.jpg
Ah, Memory Lane!
Ethan
> The computer would stop rattling when the map was up and that
> would wake me.
>
> When I joined the Matthews lab in Oregon they had a VAX 11/780.
> What an amazing machine! It had 1 MB of RAM and could run a million
> instructions in a second. It only took 48 hours to run a cycle of
> refinement with PROLSQ, that is, if no one else used the computer.
> These specs don't sound like much but this computer was really a
> revolution for computational crystallography. That a single lab
> could own a computer of such power was unheard of before this.
> It wasn't just that the computer had so much RAM (We later got it
> up to its max of 4 MB.) but the advent of virtual memory made
> program design so much easier. You could simply define an array
> of 100,000 elements and not have to worry about finding where in
> memory, mixed in with the operating system, utility programs, and
> other users' software, you could find an unused block that big.
>
> Digital didn't invent virtual memory, but the VAX made it
> achievable for regular crystallographers. Through most of the 1980's
> you didn't have to worry about getting your code to run on other
> computers - Everyone had access to a VAX.
>
> In the 1990's DEC came out with the alpha CPU chip which really
> broke ground for performance. These things screamed when in came
> to running crystallographic software. In 1999 the lab bought
> several of the 666 MHz models. It was about four years before
> Intel came out with a chip that would match these alphas on my
> crystallography benchmark and they had to be clocked at over 2 GHz
> to do it.
>
> Yes, Digital lost out in the competition of the marketplace, and
> Ken Olsen was pushed out of the company well before the end. But
> what a ride it was. What great computers they were and what great
> science was done on them!
>
> Dale Tronrud
>
--
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center, K-428 Health Sciences Bldg
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742
