A brief history of spectroscopy on EBIT

In the autumn of 1986, the first electron beam ion trap, EBIT, was put into service as a light source for the spectroscopy of highly charged ions. On the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of EBIT, we review its early uses for spectroscopy, from the first measurements of X-rays from L-shell xenon ions in 1986 to its conversion to SuperEBIT in 1992 and rebirth as EBIT-I in 2001. Together with their sibling, EBIT-II, these machines have been used at Livermore to perform a multitude of seminal studies of the physics of highly charged ions.