RasMol:
From 1992 to 1998,
RasMol (by
Roger A. Sayle)
was the best general-purpose free software for visualizing
3D structures of macromolecules on personal computers.
See Sayle's
Short History of RasMol.
In 1995, only a few years into the birth of the Internet, with the blessing of
Roger Sayle, Eric Martz created the first website for RasMol.
It was enormously popular, and the RasMol program was downloaded tens of thousands of times
from that website.
See a
1996 RasMol Movie Script,
an early version of a
tutorial on hemoglobin.
RasMol's biggest limitation was that a complicated, extensive
command language had to be learned to use it effectively.
This greatly limited the ability of college faculty or their students
to use it productively.
That became apparent when Eric Martz held workshops for college faculty in
the Northeastern USA to facilitate their use of Rasmol in their teaching
(supported by a grant from the National Science
Foundation Division of Undergraduate Education funded in February, 1997).
The experiences in these workshops
inspired Eric to start building
Protein Explorer.
Protein Explorer, created by Eric Martz, with insightful help from
Frieda Reichsman, Diana Ditmore and others,
was first available in October, 1998, and development continued
through the version documented below, version 2.81, released in 2007.
Protein Explorer won the international
2003 Merlot Exemplary Classics Award for Biology.
The award stated
"The Protein Explorer has revolutionized the teaching of biology at a molecular level."
Protein Explorer made the power of
Chime
accessible by providing buttons and forms
so that users did not need to learn any Chime command language.
Videos of Protein Explorer
The graphics below were captured in 2026 from a Windows 98 virtual machine
(in a 2015 MacBook Pro) using the web browser Mozilla Firefox version 2.0.0.20 (released
in 2008).