Acknowledgments

Many, many people have contributed to this article. In some sense it was not really written by me and should probably have about 50 authors. I should like to acknowledge as many as I can. Richard Bradley of Houston Texas was instrumental in providing me with the jump start I needed to get this article going. Dick may not believe it but he was also one of the great geophysical influences in my life. The same goes for Gerald Neale of Tulsa, OK. Gerald wrote more programs based on things I simply thought might be interesting than anyone else I ever worked with. He also always unselfishly refused to take any credit for his excellent contributions. Jim Buelow (deceased), Octa Otan, and Hank Adair showed me how much the real doodlebuggers knew about geophysics and about seismic exploration. Dan Whitmore now in Houston TX and Ken Kelly in Tulsa, OK, Sam Gray and Larry Lines in Calgary Canada, Bob Stolt of Ponca City, OK, Sven Treitel from Tulsa OK and Art Weglein of Houston TX not only provided great insight but also provided the continuing education I needed while in the dreaded managerial role. John Shanks from AMOCO introduced me to computer hardware and Vic Forsyth from Amerada Hess and my son Chris taught me most of what I know about modern cluster computer software. Yonghe Sun and Fu Hao Qin were essential parts of my "swords" at Amerada Hess. John Weigant and Steve Checkles showed me how modern depth processing should really be done while doing a great job of defining it.

A special bit of thanks goes to Norm Bleistein from the Colorado School of Mines for many years of very special friendship and technical discussions.

For this particular article I would also like to thank Richard Bradley, Sam Gray, Sven Treitel, Jon Claerbout, John Sherwood, Ed Parms, and Art Weglein for both written material and verbal discussions about the history and their role in it.

Jerry Schuster is recognized for asking me to attempt to write this article. At the start I thought it would be easy. At the end I think I understand that no matter what how hard I worked, I simply could not do justice to this effort. There are just too many individuals, too many contributions, and too many articles to read to make sure everyone involved got represented fairly. I hope I have not offended anyone by leaving them out. Any omissions are solely mine and totally unintentional.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the management at Amerada Hess for permisson to reproduce and utilize the figures and graphics in the text.