  Since the late 1970's, redshift surveys have been vital for progress in
understanding large-scale structure in the Universe. The original CfA redshift
survey collected spectra of 20-30 galaxies per clear night on a 1.5 meter
telescope; over a two year period the project added ~2000 new redshifts to the
literature. Subsequent low-z redshift surveys have been up to an order of
magnitude larger, and ongoing surveys will yield a similar improvement over the
generation preceding them. Full sky redshift surveys have a special role to
play as predictors of cosmological flows, and deep pencil beam surveys have
provided fundamental constraints on the evolution of properties of galaxies.
With the 2DF redshift survey and the SDSS survey, our knowledge of the
statistical clustering of low-redshift galaxies will achieve unprecedented
precision. Measurements of clustering in the distant Universe are more limited
at present, but will become much better in this decade as the VLT/VIRMOS and
Keck/DEIMOS projects produce results. As in so many other fields, progress in
large scale structure studies, both observational and theoretical, has been
made possible by improvements in technologies, especially computing. This
review briefly highlights twenty years of progress in this evolving discipline
and describes a few novel cosmological tests that will be attempted with the
Keck/DEIMOS survey.
