As we assemble the fifth volume of Reviews in Computational Chemistry, it is worth catching our collective breaths and looking back at the heady growth
of computational chemistry in the 1980s. The economic climate of that decade
was conducive to a healthy expansion of the field of computational chemistry.
Although many scientists may have noticed the field only in the last few years,
its present importance rests on more than 30 years of research, dating back to
the first availability of computers to chemists. If one counts the theoretical
developments that contributed to the science that became computational chem-
istry, then the history goes back even further, to the 1920s. Although the field
should have achieved its due status as venerable, challenges remain. There are
experimentalists still around who look askance at results from computer-aided
chemistry.