And ChemDraw and Word also understood this. The clipboard supported the PICT format, which meant that both picture and data could be transferred between programs. It (could) see additional data embedded in the PICT. A human saw the PICT as a PICTure, but the computer saw more. In 1984, when Apple produced the Mac, they also produced a most interesting data format called PICT. It is only now that we (more specifically, this user) understand what had happened under-the-hood to break this round-tripping.
#Chemistry add in world for mac full#
And I throw in a digital repository identifier for good measure should you want a full dataset. Which is why, on many of these posts, I put in the caption Click for 3D, which gives you access to the chemical data proper (in CML or other formats).
The chemical diagrams you see here are similarly devoid of data, being merely bit-mapped JPG images. By the way, this process of data-loss is easily demonstrated even on this blog. Upon its return to (Chemdraw in this instance), it had been rendered inert, un-editable, and devoid of semantic meaning unless a human intervened.
#Chemistry add in world for mac mac#
And (on a Mac at least) the round-tripping no longer worked. Years later, the computer and its clipboard, the chemistry software, and the word processor had all moved on many generations (it is important to flag that three different vendors were involved, all using proprietary formats to weave their magic).
Little did we realise how fragile this round trip might be. It seemed natural that a chemical structure diagram subjected to this treatment could still be chemically edited, and that it could make the round trip repeatedly. Most students of the present age have no idea what we used to do before this innovation! Perhaps not in 1985, but at some stage shortly thereafter, and in effect without most people noticing, the return journey also started working, the so-called round trip. Perchance even print the result on a laserprinter. We could acquire a computer which could be used to draw chemical structures in one application, and via a mysterious and mostly invisible entity called the clipboard, paste it into a word processor (it was called a Macintosh). For those of us who were around in 1985, an important chemical IT innovation occurred.
0 kommentar(er)
