The authors would particularly like to thank the members of the Theoretical Biophysics group, past and present, who have helped tremendously in making suggestions, pushing for new features, and trying out quite often very bug-ridden code. Tom Bishop, the original (and for some time only) VMD user, has been our driving force in suggesting (well, demanding) new features and bug fixes, and Ivo Hofacker has been extremely helpful in testing out many of the newest features in VMD. As well, thanks go to Alexander Balaeff, Xiche Hu, Barry Israeliwitz, Dorina Kosztin, Ilya Logunov, Jim Phillips, Ari Shinozaki, Svilen Tzonev, Willy Wriggers, Dong Xu, Feng Zhou, and our agent in the field, Daniel Barsky. Thanks also to all of you who have tried out the program.
Many external libraries and packages are used in VMD, and the program would not be possible without them. The authors wish to thank Jon Leech for the code to compute the uniform point distributions; T. C. Zhao and Mark Overmars, authors of the excellent XFORMS library; John Ousterhout and the other authors of the Tcl, Tk, Tcl-X, Tk-X and Tcl-DP packages; the authors of the Tracker library from the University of North Carolina; Amitabh Varshney, author of SURF, also from UNC; Dmitrij Frishman at EMBL for developing STRIDE; Jack Lund for the url_get perl script; Ethan Merrit from the University of Washington for developing the algorithm for drawing ribbons; and the LASSPTools developers at Cornell.
We also received invaluable assistance from people who got the source code and sent in patches. Stephen Searle helped finish off the OpenGL port, Michael Tiemann suggested some graphics performance enhancements, and Simon Warfield ported VMD to Solaris.