Many of the physicists studying lasers in laboratories have been confronted by the appearance of erratic intensity fluctuations in the laser beam. This type of behavior was already evident in the early days of the laser (1960s) when it was found that the intensity of the light generated by the ruby laser displayed irregular spiking. Russian theoreticians showed that equations describing an active medium coupled to an electromagnetic field could display such pulsations. Laser physicists K. Shimoda and C.L. Tang tried to relate these outputs to saturable absorption and mode competition, respectively. But the discrepancy in the values for the instability frequencies, the fact that simple rate equations only predicted damped oscillations, and the development of stable lasers shifted interest towards new topics. About the same time, spontaneous instabilities were found to play key roles in fluid mechanics, chemistry, and the life sciences. Except for some isolated pioneers like L.W. Casperson, laser physicists only understood in the early 1980s that the pulsating outputs were not the result of environmental fluctuations but rather originated from the interaction between the radiation field and matter. On June 18–21, 1985, the University of Rochester organized the first International Meeting on “Instabilities and Dynamics of Lasers and Nonlinear Optical Systems”. Two special issues of the Journal of the Optical Society of America later appeared. But it took until the early 1990s before the idea became widely accepted among physicists that lasers exhibit the same type of bifurcations as oscillating mechanical, chemical, and biological systems.