The first mention of the impedance concept appeared on
November 1966 in the CERN internal report Longitudinal
instability of a coasting beam above transition, due to the action
of lumped discontinuities by V.G. Vaccaro. Then, a more general
treatment of it appeared in February 1967 in the CERN yellow report
Longitudinal instabilities of azimuthally uniform beams in
circular vacuum chambers of arbitrary electrical properties by
A.M. Sessler and V.G. Vaccaro. The concept of wake field came two
years later, in 1969, in the paper The wake field of an
oscillating particle in the presence of conducting plates with
resistive terminations at both ends by A.G. Ruggiero and
V.G. Vaccaro. This was the beginning of many studies, which took
place over the last five decades, and today, impedances and wake
fields continue to be an important field of activity, as concerns
theory, simulation, bench and beam-based measurements. Building a
reliable impedance or wake field model of a machine is the first
necessary step to be able to evaluate the machine performance
limitations, identify the main contributors in case an impedance
reduction is required, and study the interaction with other
mechanisms such as optics nonlinearities, transverse damper, noise,
space charge, electron cloud, beam-beam (in a collider), etc. Beam
collective instabilities, and their mitigation, cover a wide range
of effects in particle accelerators and they have been the subjects
of intense research. As the machines performance was pushed new
mechanisms were revealed and nowadays the challenge consists in
studying the interplays between all these intricate phenomena, as it
is very often not possible to treat the different effects
separately. With the increasing power of our computers this becomes
easier but the need to continue and develop theories remains, to
have a better understanding of the interplays between all these
effects: the subject of impedance and beam instabilities in particle
accelerators is far from being exhausted, as testified by the many
new instability and stabilizing mechanisms which have been recently
explained or discovered. Furthermore, in the context of the studies
for possible future accelerators, some uncharted territories remain
such as, for instance, the collective instabilities during the
necessary ionization cooling for a muon collider.