In our role as the editors of a special edition of the Journal of Structural Biology published in 1996 and devoted to the development of software tools, we offer Our view of past developments and future prospects in this area. The astonishing progress in computer hardware over the past decade has fueled a significant increase in computational power available for the solution of macromolecular structures. At the same time the relatively slow growth and development of the accompanying software reflects the difficulties of developing large, complex and very specialized analytical methods. (C) 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.