[gmcenroe]

I worked for a biotech company in the 1990s and we had a Crimson workstation. I remember when we bought it from SGI, our company was also in Mountain View and we shared a parking lot with early Sun Microsystems Buildding, there were many options and price points depending on how powerful a system you wanted to put together. I think we had a midlevel configuration, its been a long time. Later we merged with another company on the east coast that moved to our site. They had a molecular modeling group and programmers who wrote code for special purposes beyond what was available on the market for chemical research, at that time. We ran it on an SGI computer that was the size of a refrigerator (Power Series?). I think that it had 8 processors and probably cost a bundle. At that time it was the most powerful SGI computer that you could buy. That was what got me interested in SGI, plus the fact that they were a legend at that time for high end graphics workstations. In reality though the software at that time for molecular modeling was not that great, but it was good for generating lots of animations and pretty pictures of you small molecule bound to a receptor or enzyme in an x-ray crystal structure. It was also used for homology modeling where you had a known structure of a protein and a new similar protein for instance from another species, mouse vs. human and one tried to create a model for the new protein from the previously known structure that had been through crystallography. It was a lot of fun.