Recalling Quark Matter '83 and the birth of RHIC

I provide a brief review of the Quark Matter '83 meeting at Brookhaven, in the context of the decisive U.S. science policy actions during the summer of 1983 that led up to it. At the Brookhaven meeting a large community of nuclear and high energy physicists came together for the first time to examine the parameters for the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider, setting the stage for decades of quark matter research to follow.