[en] Nobody could have predicted the circuitous course of the last 30 years of progress in intense beams and pulsed power. There were many discoveries and twists and turns along the way, but the steady flow of understanding and technological advances has sustained the field. Pulsed power research began in the early 1960s with the development of the technology to test the reliability of nuclear weapons in a pulsed radiation environment. Because of the effort in the 1970s on an electron beam approach to inertial confinement fusion (ICF) at Sandia National Laboratories and at the Kurchatov Institute, simulation codes, diagnostics, and innovative pulsed power techniques such as self-magnetic insulation were developed. The electron approach ended in 1979, and the more promising ion approach continued. At the same time, z pinches, used since the early 1970s to evaluate the response of materials to keV X rays, were considered as an alternative to drive ICF capsules. The use of z pinches for ICF was discontinued in 1984 because of budget cuts and the belief that ions offered a route to the standoff requirement for energy applications. Now, in 1998, because of budget limitations and the 1995 discovery that the soft x-ray power achievable in a z-pinch implosion can be greatly enhanced, the ion approach has been suspended, and a new facility, X-1, proposed to achieve high yield in the laboratory with z pinches. In this paper the authors review the research paths that led to these changes, describe the present status of z pinches, and predict what the future holds. Although nobody can predict the future, the past 30 years have taught us some lessons that can be applied to the next 30 years. The paper concludes with some of these lessons learned