It's an exciting time to be doing cosmology! The last time we changed government in England was when the first deep photographic counts were published and Beatrice Tinsley suggested measuring the redshifts of a sample of galaxies to B = 21. She predicted a small fraction of the bluest sources might be high redshift primordial galaxies. After 15 years of ground-based work and only 4 years of post-refurbishment HST data, we have clearly come a long way. The acceleration of this subject in the past 2 years owes a great deal to HST and, within that context, to the HDF itself. There is much more data to come and much more physics to do. The much heralded 'synthesis' of theory and data is premature in my view. So far we are mainly surveying. The more fundamental task of understanding will take considerably longer. When we finally get there, I believe we will all recall that moment when we first saw the spectacular image of the Hubble Deep Field.
I thank the organizers for inviting me to give this opening review and for generous financial assistance. Full credit for the success of the HDF must go to Bob Williams and his talented team at ST ScI.