In the 1960’s, I was fortunate to participate in the renaissance in holography that was launched in the U.S. by Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks. In this paper, I discuss some of our early activities in holography at Stanford. My discussion will cover the following subjects: Long distance holography (1966-69) – holography over a 12 km path; Digital reconstruction of holographic images (1967) – detection of a hologram on a vidicon and reconstruction of the image by computer; and Photon-limited holography (1968) – experiments verifying Gabor’s prediction tha,t under the right conditions, holography can be a more sensitive detection image method than conventional direct detection. These might be considered esoteric subjects, far from display holography. In at least one case, the work turned out to be important.
