A short history of neutrinos, what we have learned about them, what we have learned using them, up to neutrino oscillations.”

This, the opening talk of the Kyoto conference, Neutrino 2012, attempts a brief review of the history of the neutrinos, up to neutrino oscillations, beginning with the discovery of the continuous β spectrum in 1914, to the demonstration of the tau neutrino in 2001, the contributions of the study of neutrino interactions to the evolution of the electroweak and the QCD theories, in particular the discovery of neutral currents, the demonstrations that the partons of nuclear structure are quarks, and the first quantitative confirmation of QCD in the scaling violations of deep inelastic scattering, and the structure functions of the nucleon