Strings and Superstrings

The last Nobel Symposium on elementary particle physics ended on May 25 1968. The main topics discussed at that meeting were: high energy scattering of hadrons, infinite component field theory and electroweak unification. The last of these topics is the one which is best remembered since it is associated with the revolution in our understanding of the field theoretic description of the weak and electromagnetic forces. The first two topics, however, are closely associated with the origins of string theory. This talk will survey the development of string theory from that time up to the summer of 1984, since when there has been an explosion of activity in superstring theory which forms the main topic of this meeting.