Between the Hughes press release in July 1960 (announcing the first laser) and the fall of '62 (when the CW visible beam He-Ne became available commercially), lasers were in the lab and nursed by physicists. Pictures from that period of lasers are hard to find, but here's a really good one. It shows Robert J. Collins of Bell Labs with a ruby laser on the cover of Radio-Electronics of May, 1961. The article by him and D. F. Nelson is a short one titled "The Optical Maser - Communications at 450,000,000 Mc!", and includes a sketch of the innards of the ruby laser head.
One of the pioneers of laser light projections is Lloyd G. Cross, who built the first commercial laser light show projector called the "Sonovision Audio-Display Unit". He previously founded the first company started specifically to make pulsed lasers, Trion Instruments, in 1961 (though Raytheon sold the first laser commercially in March of that year). Lloyd started Trion with Don Gillespie (later of Eldon), after the two heard a talk about the ruby laser given in Ann Arbor by Robert Collins. This picture of him is from right at that time. A real nugget for the collection!
Here's the post I made a while ago about Sonovision. The link to the listing is dead, so here's the ad from a 1969 Billboard.
http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums/...ght=sonovision