We describe some chosen ideas and results for more than 100 years prehistory and history of the remarkable development concerning Hardy-type inequalities. In particular, we present a newer convexity approach, which we believe could partly have changed this development if Hardy had discovered it. In order to emphasize the current very active interest in this subject, we finalize by presenting some examples of the recent results, which we believe have potential not only to be of interest for a broad audience from a historical perspective, but also to be useful in various applications.