The first Optical Society of America (OSA) Topical Meeting on Picosec ond Phenomena, held at Hilton Head, South Carolina, in 1978, brought together in a congenial setting an interdisciplinary group of laser engineers and physicists who were exploring the emerging technologies for generat ing and applying picosecond optical pulses, together with scientists from the fields of chemistry, physics, biology, and electronics who saw in those pulses capabilities for studying atomic and molecular phenomena on time scales previously unrealizable. The technology in this field has since developed even...