[en] You have heard a great deal about Plastic Ball results at this conference. There were talks on the first morning by Hans-Georg Ritter and Karl-Heinz Kampert on the Plastic Ball at Berkeley, there will be a talk next week by Rudi Schmidt on the Plastic Ball at CERN, and many other speakers have mentioned Plastic Ball results. The young students may think that when the new field of relativistic heavy ion physics opened up, an ideal detector was designed and built, data immediately analyzed, and results produced. The theme of my talk is to show that this is incorrect. The experiments proceeded in logical stages, one building upon the other, increasing in complexity and sophistication. The analysis techniques and the theory developed along with the experiments. If the more senior people in the audience easily remember this history of the development of the relativistic heavy ion field, they may spend their time during this talk thinking about what is happening now and what will happen in the future in the ultrarelativistic heavy ion field, where I believe history is repeating itself. 18 refs., 18 figs