First superstring revolution

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In physics, the first superstring revolution is a period of important discoveries in string theory roughly between 1984 and 1986. It was realised that string theory was capable of describing all elementary particles as well as the interactions between them. Hundreds of physicists started to work on string theory as the most promising idea to unify physical theories. The revolution was started by a discovery of anomaly cancellation in type I string theory via the Green-Schwarz mechanism in 1984. Several other ground-breaking discoveries, such as the heterotic string, were made in 1985. It was also realised in 1985 that to obtain $N = 1$ supersymmetry, the six small extra dimensions need to be compactified on a Calabi-Yau manifold.

Discover Magazine in the November, 1986 issue (vol 7, #11) featured a cover story written by Gary Taubes "Everything's Now Tied to Strings" which explained string theory for a popular audience.