Software attached to hardware

In the early days of crystallography, instrument manufacturing companies made hardware only. The crystallographers that used the instruments wrote their own software.

Over the years more and more software has been integrated with the diffraction systems, to the extent that around half of the development cost for new instruments now is spent on software. There are two reasons
for this: First the some of the steps in crystallographic software are now standard and taken for granted, and for most crystallographers these are no longer the subject of research. Second, instruments have become
more complex and require much more software to run.

In my talk, I will show the different kinds of software needed to run a modern diffraction instrument, and how these interact. I will also discuss how the architecture of the software evolves. In the workshops
we can go deeper into specific topics like instrument calibration, system alignment, diffraction image handling, data collection strategies, GUI usability, or anything else related to software attached to hardware that is brought up.