This short paper is a written version of one part of the plenary address given at the November 1999 NOLTA symposium held at the Hilton Waikoloa Village in Hawaii. I was invited by Professor Shin'ichi Oishi, a general vice-chairman of the symposium, to give a survey of some of my own research. I was happy to do that--in the context of a description of what Bell Labs.' research environment was like in its math center in the 1960's, and why I feel that today's young researchers are often too constrained in that they are typically not encouraged to try to do really interesting work. Here the emphasis is on only the origins of input-output stability theory.