Although details have changed, parts of the current organization of the SPIDER system (in terms of procedure definitions, document files, registers, and symbolic parameters) go back to a number of brainstorms, some 47 years ago, with Brian Shimkin and Helen Dowse, both Computer Science students at SUNY Albany. The first description of SPIDER was published in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Electron Microscopy in Toronto, in 1978.