The Fairborn Institute, since its inception, has been involved in developing increasingly capable telescopes, instrumentation, and software. The “Cal Poly 18,” designed and built by Institute staff members and undergraduate students at California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), pioneered the use of direct-drives in smaller telescopes that led to the development of the PlaneWave Instruments 0.7- and 1.0-meter production telescopes. Current developments include full automation of speckle interferometry, use of aperture masks for discovering faint secondary stars, and encouraging the formation of fleets of infrared and ultraviolet CubeSat space telescopes in the coming decade.