Thanks for that, talk about a blast from the past. It would have been incredible to actually create a "disk", save a document, but still ... thanks.
I wrote my honours thesis, in Newmarket, Brisbane, Australia, 1984, on an Apple 11e, I'm pretty sure it was. The program and machine was courtesy of my housemate, Tim A. He had a Forestry degree, a job in state govt, probably primary industries, thus accounting for how he was onto it. I seem to remember Zardax was from a company in Mt Gravatt, another Brisbane suburb, and it was very respected, used worldwide. It was what he used at work. How lucky was I? I seem to remember it had an asteroids or klingon type space blip shooter game on it, maybe even a pong one. All work and no play...
I got there via a first attempt on a little Sinclair ZX81, which had little tape drive for strorage. That was courtesy my then brother in law, Martin T.
Talk about start of tech revolutions stuff, my honours project first step was to make a DNA probe, by hand, with micro quickfit glassware, microlitre syringe aliquots, but also litre scale solvent reservoirs, all driven by switching pressure from argon cylinders, an horrendous apparatus I'd put together, not out of place in the Tardis.
And 4 little bottles of phosporamidite nucleotide base derivatives, A, C, G and T, flown in from Boston to our organic chem lab, thanks Ron Q. Super dry organic solvents, that was the key, flamed glassware, baked molecular sieves, water was the enemy, competing with the joining condensation reaction at the growing chain. Big idea was to then move up, with the probe I built, (target minimum of 14 or so in the chain, think about it, at stepwise efficiency of even 90 %, after 14 iterations, what percent final product could be hoped for?. Some things are best done by million dollar robots, but we didn't have one of them, I dunno if there was one in the country.
But did I learn about the the craft and graft of working science? Debugging why I wasn't getting my efficiencies high enough, the chain petering out, test charts from my IR absorption ( probably) spectroscopy tests showed my solvents were drier than any reference one, WTF? A physics prof had setup a very early version NMR lab, in next building, I hit on the first principles idea of "Could we look at 31P NMR signature of the phosphorus at heart of starting materials derivatives, test for oxidation state?" Maybe, let's give it a try. Yep, you guessed it, signs of starting materials significantly hydrolysed, ( or did the hydrolysis all happen in NMR sample prep? It gave me something to write up, show the cut of my jib.) Those little bottles were meant to be loaded into the supplier company million dollar robot sealed internal clean room chamber and just run in a scaled production environment, and swapped out, none of this opening bottles, taking a sample, in and out of the -20 freezer rigmarole . They took mercy on me and scraped up funds to order me a probe to my specifications so I could move on to the actual gene screen which is what it was really all about.
DNA technology, molecular biology of 1984, that's another story, what a hoot. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/j.1460-2075.1984.tb02230.x
Then write it up, thank you Zardax, that was a race to the finish. I had a job offer by christmas eve to help set up new molecular genetics lab in a children's hospital. Happy days, thank you John H.