The development of biotechology in the 1970s and 1980s went alongside another change in the life sciences: the use of computers in research. CSHL scientist and Protein Databases, Inc., co-founder Jim Garrels describes how he “brought the first computer into the lab” as a part of his 2D gel analysis work “because back then…biologists didn’t use computers. That was thought to be something for the physical scientists or maybe business, but biologists had no need, and most people would just scoff at the thought of a computer, especially one on your desk. It didn’t make sense.” The computer that he brought in was hard to miss. “It was called a PDP 11/60. It came in through the window of the Carnegie Library…I was on the top floor and I had the whole end of the building was my area. A third of it was the computer room, which was air conditioned. There’s a big computer like the size of a refrigerator, the disc drives, I still have one. It’s like 12 inches across and eight inches high, a big pack with many platters in it,” like a stack of records. And “the disc drive was a whole other machine the size of a washing machine… And so that was, like I said, the first in the lab. And we had underground cables that connected it to terminals over in the gel lab, which was in the McClintock building. So all that was new and had never been seen before.”
