  This paper provides a brief review of the history of our understanding and
knowledge of black holes. Starting with early speculations on ``dark stars'' I
discuss the Schwarzschild "black hole" solution to Einstein's field equations
and the development of its interpretation from "physically meaningless" to
describing the perhaps most exotic and yet "most perfect" macroscopic object in
the universe. I describe different astrophysical black hole populations and
discuss some of their observational evidence. Finally I close by speculating
about future observations of black holes with the new generation of
gravitational wave detectors.
