The first milestone in the discovery of extrasolar planets was in 1992, when Wolszczan and Frail published results in the journal Nature indicating that pulsar planets existed around PSR B1257+12. Wolszczan had discovered the millisecond pulsar in question in 1990 [...
If you like him or not is of course totally up to you. But I think at least this speech is worth watching the whole 37 minutes.