Twenty five years ago the Chemistry Development Kit (CDK) was founded. The Chemistry and Internet (ChemInt2000) had just ended (it ran from 23 to 26 September) and my friend and I had taken the Amtrak night train from Washington to South Bend. At that time there were two leading Java applets for chemistry, JChemPaint and Jmol. I had hacked Chemical Markup Language support into both of them, and Dan Gezelter (Jmol and openscience.org), Christoph Steinbeck (JChemPaint), and me took the opportunity of being in North America to discuss if we could use a common code base. Chris’ compchem had done something similar. Peter Murray-Rust, who had also attended ChemInt2000 like me and Chris did not attend.