  Although it is just over a year since the data was made public, the HDF
exposure has stimulated considerable progress towards our understanding of the
faint galaxy population. I present a brief personal account of the history of
faint galaxy studies culminating in the HDF, and describe what I consider to be
the main highlights thus far from this remarkable image. The HDF has given
considerable impetus to studies of galaxy evolution and this has led to the
emergence of a convincing empirical framework. Further exploitation of deep HST
images in conjunction with ground-based 2-D spectroscopy will assist in the
physical understanding of the evolutionary processes involved.
