This is one of the few photos I have from my first experiments at the ALS, in 1994. Beamline 9.0.1. We were developing interferometric tests for zone plate lenses, to show that focusing with diffraction-limited quality was possible for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light. All motivated by dreams of EUV lithography. Twenty-five years later, give or take, EUV light was used to make computer chips in mass production and now it's in every iPhone and GPU chip.

In front is my mentor in all things, Hector Medecki. Left is fellow graduate student, Raul Beguiristain and technician Jim Smithwick. I am seated on the right running the camera, while my thesis advisor, Jeff Bokor, points to an image of a pinhole-diffracted Airy pattern. 13.4 nm wavelength. A highly coherent beam on an insertion device beamline, three decades before ALS-U. Incidentally, the undulator source was moved to Sector 12 in about 1996.

Just for historical perspective, ALS Beamline 9.0.1 in 1993 was where I first encountered the Mosaic web browser and used it to view the small number of sites on the internet. Jeff showed us on the beamline's Sun Workstation, as I recall, and we were all quite excited about it.