XtalView, protein structure solution and protein graphics, a short history.

From a user's point-of-view we are in the Golden Age of protein crystallographic software. In the past few decades, solving protein structures has gone from a task requiring man-months of effort to a process requiring minutes on an ordinary laptop with no human intervention required. The birth of XtalView coincided with the mainstream use of synchrotron radiation, seleno-Met phasing and it continues to be used in this age of robotic crystallization, Fed-Ex data collection and fully automated structure solution "pipelines". This article is a retrospective history of protein crystallographic computing and a discussion of the current state of the art.