Milestones
- 1962: Contract execution and start of accelerator construction
- 1966: Construction completed and research begins
- 1967: 20-GeV electron beam achieved
- 1968: First evidence discovered for quarks
- 1972: SPEAR operations begin
- 1973: Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Project (SSRP) started
- 1974: Discovery of psi particle
- 1976: Discovery of charm quark and tau lepton
- 1976: Nobel Prize shared by SLAC's Burton Richter for the J/psi discovery
- 1977: SSRP becomes Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Laboratory (SSRL)
- 1980: PEP operations begin
- 1982: Wolf Prize awarded to SLAC's Martin Perl for discovery of the tau lepton
- 1984: SLAC named a National Historic Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers
- 1989: SLC operations begin, 50 GeV electron and positron beams achieved
- 1990: Nobel Prize shared by SLAC's Richard Taylor for first evidence that nucleons consist of quarks
- 1990: SPEAR becomes a dedicated synchrotron radiation facility with its own independent injector.
- 1991: SLAC installs first World Wide Web server in the United States
- 1992: SSRL becomes a Division of SLAC
- 1993: Final Focus Test Beam facility constructed
- 1994: Initiation of the PEP-II project to build the Asymmetric B Factory
- 1995: Nobel Prize in Physics shared by Martin Perl for the discovery of the tau lepton.
- 1996: NLCTA project initiated
- 1997: First beam injected into B Factory
- 1998: First B Factory particle collision occurs
- 1999: First Events recorded by B Factory's BaBar detector
- 2000: Joint NASA-Stanford GLAST project initiated, Helen Quinn shares Dirac Medal
- 2002: SLAC celebrates 40th anniversary, LCLS project approved
- 2003: Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology established
- 2004: SPEAR3 comes online
- 2005: Sidney Drell receives Heinz Award for Public Policy
- 2006 and after: See online SLAC Press Release Archive
