Four years ago, accelerator physicists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) began construction of the Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator (NLCTA), a 42‐meter‐long experimental prototype segment of what they call the “Next Linear Collider.” The NLC they hope to build early in the next century would be a face‐to‐face pair of 10‐km linacs firing electrons and positrons at each other with collision energies up to a TeV (1012electron volts).