In October 2000, Folding@home was officially released. The main software core engine was the Tinker molecular dynamics (MD) code. Tinker was chosen as the first scientific core due to its versatility and well laid out software design. In particular, Tinker was the only code to support a wide variety of MD force fields and solvent models. With the Tinker core, we were able to make several advances, including the first folding of a small protein starting purely from sequence (subsequently published in Nature).