Aberdeen, Maryland in the late 1940s was an exciting place to be. They had a computer so powerful and so energy intensive that there were rumours that when it switched on, the lights in Philadelphia dimmed.
The computer – called the ENIAC – took up an area almost the size of a tennis court. It needed 18,000 vacuum tubes and had cords thicker than fists crisscrossing the room connecting one section to another.
Despite its size, today it’s less impressive. Its computing power would be dwarfed by a desk calculator.
Professor Tom Stace, the Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Engineered Quantum Systems (EQUS) believes that quantum computing is best thought of not as computers like we know them today, but as big lumbering systems like the ENIAC.
“ENIAC was the first digital computer,” said Stace.
“You see engineers programming, but that meant literally unplugging cables and plugging them into these gigantic room-size things. That’s sort of what a quantum computer looks like now. It’s literally bolt cables that people have to wire up and solder together.”
To understand where we’re at with quantum computing currently, you first have to understand their potential.
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