I purposely made a break last week as I realized that 2 quality articles per week took me too much time (especially ICF once). Now, I am up-to-date with my real-life obligations and will write about nuclear fusion once a week. After principles of ICF and MCF, I will move on to the history.
Before lasers
Inertial confinement was a theoretical principle in the 1950s. The idea came as peace version of the H-bomb, where the driver was a fission explosion. However, the scientist did not know what kind of driver can press something so strongly, yet so safely.
The lack of experiments does not make scientists quitting, especially if it is for military purpose. Henceforth, a team from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) did simulations of Deuterium-Tritium implosion. They easily obtained 10-fold power plant output - i.e. that device would give 10 times more energy than we would put in it. This was too optimistic calculation even in comparison for back-then-superoptimistic magnetic confinement oriented scientists.
Laser
Before the laser, the main candidate for the driver was a particle beam. Looking at it simply, one could think the beam particles could also undergo fusion. However, this showed not to be the case - as particles were too fast, so there was no time for interaction ("communication") between the particles.
With the invention of the lasers in 1960, several laboratories across the world started the experiments with inertial confinement. However, early laser showed to be too weak (low energy) for such purpose.
More lasers
In 1980s research in all fusion aspects was in its peak, due to the 1979 oil crisis. In inertial fusion they started making larger, stronger lasers with more and more (tens) of beams, but as you can imagine no ignition was achieved. Actually, inertial confinement was very far from it due to very asymmetric implosions and difficulty to diagnose the plasma.
A decade after the 1979 oil crisis has passed, governments started to reduce funding in any fusion research (there could be a connection with cold fusion hoax in 1989). It was obvious that ignition with ICF has to wait for the 21st century.
Next to come - the history of MCF!
Please feel free to ask anything in the comments. I will either try to answer you in the comment or even make the new post.