The program was created starting in about 1990 by Joe McDaniel and Jason Balmuth while at Fein-Marquart Associates with funding from the National Cancer Institute under a Small Business Innovative Research Grant.
The program was created to satisfy a need at the NCI for entering chemical structures into a database.
The format required for the database was a connection table while the published form of a structure was a drawing.
The program could take a scanned image of the drawn structure and automatically read the atom labels (characters) and lines between atoms (bonds) to create the connection table for input into the database.
[1] Several articles describing the internal operation of the program were written and published in refereed journals such as the Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences.