  This is a survey of the historical development of the Spectral Standard Model
and beyond, starting with the ground breaking paper of Alain Connes in 1988
where he observed that there is a link between Higgs fields and finite
noncommutative spaces. We present the important contributions that helped in
the search and identification of the noncommutative space that characterizes
the fine structure of space-time. The nature and properties of the
noncommutative space are arrived at by independent routes and show the
uniqueness of the Spectral Standard Model at low energies and the Pati-Salam
unification model at high energies.
