Sent to CCL by: "Boyd, Donald B." [dboyd**iupui.edu]
Many computational chemists consider the founding of the field to be the launch of the Journal of Computational Chemistry in 1980 by Professor Norman Lou Allinger, Editor.
He first presented his idea of the need for a new journal to the American Chemical Society. The bureaucrats there were not interested. So, Professor Allinger shopped his proposal to the publisher John Wiley & Sons. They could see the wisdom and foresightedness of his idea and made it a reality with Dr. Allinger as Editor.
Twenty-five years later the ACS bureaucrats finally woke up and launched the Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation (JCTC) and the Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling (JCIM) in 2005 with Professor William Jorgensen as Editor in Chief.
Prior to Allinger in 1980, people working in the field were generally considered to be theoretical chemists.