  The study of pulsars has come a long way since their accidental discovery as
``scruff'' on pen chart recordings of the radio sky at 81 MHz by Jocelyn Bell
and Anthony Hewish at Cambridge some thirty years ago. The present sample of
almost 800 objects is the result of an immense amount of observing time at the
largest radio telescopes around the world. This article highlights the most
exciting finds, and summarises the most commonly used, yet relatively simple,
techniques which continue to be most efficient at finding weak periodic signals
hidden in noisy time series.
