  We briefly recall the historical environment around our 1971 and 1975
constructions of current-algebraic internal symmetry on the open string. These
constructions included the introduction of world sheet fermions, the
independent discovery of affine Lie algebra in physics (level one of affine
su(3)), the first examples of the affine-Sugawara and coset constructions, and
finally - from compactified spatial dimensions on the string - the first
vertex-operator constructions of the fermions and level one of affine su(n).
