1968. We were young. Revolution was in the air. Gabriele Veneziano's paper [Ven68] was an event in that eventful year. It was immediately clear that it was an important result, but very few people would have thought of it as the beginning of an entirely new theoretical approach that was going to grow in the shell of the old one. It seems appropriate to me to try to combine in this Chapter my personal recollections of the days of the birth of string theory with a few observations on a change in perspective that occurred in theoretical physics. It is a change that we expected in society and that we have witnessed in the course of the years in physics.

It is enough to look at the high energy physics titles of the W. A. Benjamin series Frontiers in Physics, that started in 1961, to get the feeling of the early Sixties: in the first year, Geoffrey F. Chew's S-Matrix Theory of Strong Interactions; in 1963, Regge Poles and S-Matrix by S. C. Frautschi, Mandelstam Theory and Regge Poles by R. Omnès and M. Froissart, together with Complex Angular Momenta and Particle Physics by E. J. Squires; in 1964, Strong-Interaction Physics by M. Jacob and G. F. Chew. Chew's Analytic S-Matrix, with its openly programmatic subtitle A Basis for Nuclear Democracy, was published in 1966, again by Benjamin. In order to complete the list one has to add to these S-matrix inspired titles only a few books, among which is The Eightfold Way by M. Gell-Mann and Y. Ne'eman.