19 History, Authors, and Contributors

VIEWMOL started its life somewhere in 1991 as a tool to draw IR and Raman spectra from Turbomole outputs. Since drawing only spectra soon turned out to be insufficient for writing a PhD thesis, capabilities were added to draw the molecule and animate normal modes. Since other people in the Arbeitsgruppe Quantenchemie at Humboldt University in Berlin got interested in the program and wanted extensions for other program's output Andreas Bünger (a then 16 year old high school student on a practical course in the group) and Andreas Bleiber started to write an input filter for GAUSSIAN 9X. Arne Dummer wrote a filter for DMOL. In the course of the research performed in the group other capabilities were asked for and added by the original authors and by Mariann Krossner (calculation of inelastic neutron scattering intensities) and Andries de Man (extension of GAUSSIAN 9X input filter to read density functional outputs). Version 1.2 was presented at the German/Austrian Academic Software Award competition in 1993 and honored as outstanding achievement.

With the advent of Linux it was recognized that the original Fortran/IrisGL version would be difficult to port to more affordable hardware. Version 2.0 of the program was a complete rewrite in C/OpenGL by Jörg-Rüdiger Hill now mainly done on a Linux system. Development of the program continues on Linux.

Contributions, mainly in form of bug reports, code snippets, and enhancement requests have come from a number of people. In no particular order (and hopefully without forgetting somebody) I want to thank:

I also have to thank Mark J. Kilgard (mjk@nvidia.com) and Brian Paul (brian_paul@avid.com) who posted a number of the algorithms used in VIEWMOL on the Internet.

Translations of VIEWMOL's interface to other languages have been provided by:


Jörg-Rüdiger Hill Fri Oct 31 14:19:21 CET 2003