A taste of the good ol' days: ancient CAS Online

Goodness, it's just that easy.
Photo credit: chembase.com

I was flipping through some older literature today, and found a wonderful reminder from March's "Advanced Organic Chemistry" (2001, 5th edition) of the torture pain sheer agony effort it took to search through SciFinder before the graphical interface arrived.

• "The procedure for building a structure can be long and complex, if the structure is large and complex, but the commands are simple. We will illustrate by building the structure for 3-ethylpiperidine, which uses the most important commands.
• We begin with the command STRUCTURE. [snip]
• We will then get the prompt ENTER (DIS), GRA, NOD, BON OR ?
• GRA is used for putting in rings or chains. We enter GRA R6, DIS [snip]
• We wish to introduct a two-atom side chain (the Et group), so we enter GRA 3 C2, DIS [snip]
• [a bunch of clarifying text]
• To get 3-ethylpiperidine, the atom in the 5 position must be nitrogen. A C can be changed to another element by using NOD (for node), so we now type NOD 5 N, DIS. This changes C-5 to N-5, giving all the atoms in their final positions. 
• However, the structure is still not complete because the bonds have not been specified [snip], so we type BON ALL SE, DIS and we get our final structure in Figure A.1. 
• At this point we type END, and get L1 STRUCTURE CREATED. 

Oh, you want to search this structure? Forget it. My fingers are cramping. 

Young ones (myself included), if you ever get tired of older chemists railing about how hard they had it back in the day, think to yourself "they didn't have a structure editor in their SciFinder" and cut 'em a break. (a little one)