As succeeding generations of high-speed computers became available, they were used in the Brill laboratory. Dr. John H. Venable, Jr., the first graduate student whom Dr. Brill advised, started this tradition. The best main frame machine available to him at that time (1962 -1965) was the IBM 790, the last major vacuum tube model. Dr. Venable shares with Drs. R. Aasa and T. Vånngärd (then at the University of Uppsala) the distinction of being, independently, the first to simulate electron paramagnetic (EPR) resonance spectra, an advance made possible by the new hardware. Dr. Venable then proceeded to program non-linear least-squares fitting of such spectra to the experimental ones. The IBM 7094, a transistor version of the 709, began to be used at this time. These advances are summarized briefly in
"Electron Paramagnetic Resonance Spectroscopy of Protein Single Crystals: II. Computational Methods," J.H. Venable, Jr. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference of Magnetic Resonance in Biological Systems, A. Ehrenberg, B. Malmström and T. Vånngärd, Eds. Pergamon Press,1967.
Another graduate student, Dr. Charles P. Scholes, simulated EPR spectra during the period 1965-1968 on the transistor-based IBM 360.
Over the next 35 years, there was a succession of mainframe computers used by the Brill group:
Achievements made possible by these systems can be found in publications listed under Research Results