Prehistory – Starting from ’t Hooft’s (1971) we have a short look at Taylor’s and Slavnov’s works (1971–72) and at the lectures given by Rouet and Stora in Lausanne (1973) which determine the transition from pre-history to history.

History – We give a brief account of the main analyses and results of the BRS collaboration concerning the renormalized gauge theories, in particular the method of the regularization-independent, algebraic renormalization, the algebraic proof of S-matrix unitarity and that of gauge choice independence of the renormalized physics. We conclude this report with a suggestion to the crucial question: what could remain of BRS invariance beyond perturbation theory.