Inertial Confinement Fusion (ICF) was first discussed in public in 1972 in a famous paper published in Nature by John Nuckolls and colleagues at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The idea discussed in the Nature paper is to compress and heat a small pellet of deuterium and tritium (the thermonuclear fuel) using high-power lasers. The compressed fuel is in the plasma state and thermonuclear reactions take place until the fuel disassembles. The subject has developed considerably both theoretically and experimentally since that time. Most recently experiments at the National Ignition Facility, a 2MJ laser at LLNL, have shown more energy from the thermonuclear reactions than is input from the laser. In this talk we will discuss some of the history of ICF, which actually started long before 1972, and discuss its future prospects.