III-V compound semiconductors, first identified in 1950, have become critically important for the commercial development of advanced semiconductor devices and systems. In the past fifty-some years, many workers from all over the world have contributed to this outstanding success. The epitaxial growth of III-V films began in 1960 with the early work of Holonyak who used iodine transport in a closed tube to produce epitaxial layers of GaAs/GaAs, GaAs/Ge, and various GaAsP alloys. Open-tube VPE and LPE for III-Vs were developed soon after this work. In 1967, Manasevit, et al., demonstrated the metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) epitaxial growth process and in 1970 Cho, et al. reported the first molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) growth of GaAs. Thus, twenty years after the first identification of III-Vs as semiconductors, all of the epitaxial growth processes we use today had been developed. It has taken 30 more years of technological and scientific advances to arrive at the understanding of these materials that we take for granted today. In fact, much of the new advanced communications systems that will be employed in the next 10 years depend fundamentally upon III-V epitaxial growth. In this talk, I will briefly review some aspects of the history of the development of these material systems and growth processes and I will discuss some of the recent results as well as speculate on the future development of III-V compound semiconductor materials.