History
VMD has been developed by the Theoretical and Computational Biophysics group at the University of Illinois and the Beckman Institute. The original version, called VRChem, was developed in 1992 by Mike Krogh, Bill Humphrey, and Rick Kufrin. The initial version of VMD was written by William Humphrey, Andrew Dalke, Ken Hamer, Jon Leech, and James Phillips (see the README at ) and was released in 1995. The earliest versions of VMD were developed for Silicon Graphics workstations and could also run in the CAVE (see the configure script in ) and communicate with a NAMD simulation. After the original VMD developers moved on to other careers, Sergei Izrailev took over maintaining the program until 1998 (final release by Izrailev). In 1998, John Stone became the main VMD developer (first release by Stone), porting VMD to many other Unix operating systems and completing the first full-featured OpenGL version. The first version of VMD for the Microsoft Windows platform was released in 1999. In 2001, Justin Gullingsrud, and Paul Grayson, and John Stone added support for haptic feedback devices and further developing the interface between VMD and NAMD for performing interactive molecular dynamics simulations. In subsequent developments, Jordi Cohen, Gullingsrud, and Stone entirely rewrote the graphical user interfaces, added built-in support for display and processing of volumetric data, and the first use of OpenGL Shading Language.
Read more about this topic: Visual Molecular Dynamics
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