The general design of this package was initiated by Lynn Ten Eyck. He set up the user interface to the programs and established their internal data structures while here at Brian Matthews' lab. While Lynn completed much of the coding for the initial version of the program, he left the lab before the completion of the project. Mike Schmid picked up the project and got the programs running well enough that he could do some refinement but the programs did not behave properly and it was clear that much debugging and development was still required. In the process of this debugging and development a number of new features were incorporated into the package to enhance its flexibility, speed, generality, user-friendliness, and general usefulness as an all-purpose program for macromolecular structure refinement.
Since I picked up the project in 1981 I was aided in my work by many discussions with everyone in the Matthews lab. The most important and frequent of these discussions were with Meg Holmes, Larry Weaver, Jim Remington, and of course, Brian himself. Meg wrote the first draft of this manual, and most everyone in the lab has proofread it at one time or another.
The suggestion that the gradient/curvature method be incorporated into TNT was first made by Ron Stenkamp.