I was privileged to be either a participant or an observer in many of the developments involved in string and superstring theory and my attachment to the CERN Theory Division during much of the Seventies gave me a grandstand view of much of it. In what follows I shall try to describe my own experiences, what I did, or tried to do, and what I saw and heard, because those are the things of which I am most certain. So, in particular, this does not aspire to be a comprehensive history.

I was present in the ballroom of the Hofburg when Gabriele Veneziano first presented his dual scattering amplitude to the wider world of theoretical physics during the Vienna Conference on High Energy Physics (28 August–5 September 1968). Despite the bad acoustics of the venue that experience changed my life and makes an appropriate start for my account [CERN68, Ven68], even though there is important prehistory.

The idea that there could be formulae for particle scattering amplitudes that could be, in some sense, almost exact fell on fertile ground. My scientific outlook had been formed in DAMTP, Cambridge, UK where the influence of the then charismatic figure, Geoffrey Chew, of the University of California at Berkeley still held sway. He and his school, influenced by the earlier work of Werner Heisenberg, had argued that scattering amplitudes of hadrons were the appropriate quantities to think about, rather than the quantum fields that create the particles.