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