alt Hacker NewsAs someone that works in quantum computing research both academic and private, no it isn't imminent in my understanding of the word, but it will happen. We are still at that point whereby we are comparable to 60's general computing development. Many different platforms and we have sort of decided on the best next step but we have many issues still to solve. A lot of the key issues have solutions, the problem is more getting everyone to focus in the right direction, which also will mean when funding starts to focus in the right direction. There are snake oil sellers right now and life will be imminently easier when they are removed.
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Not to be snarky, but how is it comparable to 60's computing? There was a commercial market for computers and private and public sector adoption and use in the 60s.
In the 60's we actually had extremely capable, fully-developed computers. Advanced systems like the IBM System360 and CDC 6600.
Quantum computing is currently stuck somewhere in the 1800's, when a lot of the theory was still being worked out and few functional devices had even been constructed.
> it will happen.
If you were to guess what reasons there might be that it WON’T happen, what would some of those reasons be?
What makes you confident that it will happen?
The people who are inside the machine are usually the least qualified to predict the machine's future
Wouldn't the comparison be more like the 1920s for computing. We had useful working computers in the 1940s working on real problems doing what was not possible before hand. By the 1950s we had computers doing Nuclear bomb simulations and the 1960s we had computers in banks doing accounting and inventory. So we had computers by then, not in homes, but we had them. In the 1920s we had mechanical calculators and theories on computation emerging but not a general purpose computer. Until we have a quantum computer doing work at least at the level of a digital computer I can't really believe it being the 1960s.