Forty Years and It Won't Start

The argument for the computer sounded impeccable.

Everything that gets in a chemist’s way, capricious substances, dirty glassware, weeks of waiting, is abolished in the machine with a stroke of the pen: you yourself decide what particles there are and by what laws they interact, you are free to throw out friction, viscosity and the second law of thermodynamics if they get under your feet, and you count generations in millions overnight instead of waiting a billion years.

This was seriously attempted at the very beginning of the nineties, and it is worth going through what happened in detail, because exactly half of it succeeded.