Start of data taking on Monday, 23 November. The first ‘event’ pops up in the ALICE Control Room at 16:41 hrs. Paper submitted to EPJC 28 Nov 2009, accepted in a few days, and published after a few weeks.

• It took 20 years to build ALICE
• 40 minutes to take the first data
• 1 hour to get the preliminary result (±10%)
• 2 days for the final result ……and
• 3 days to agree on the Author list