alt Hacker NewsWouldn'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.
I'm not going to pretend that I am that knowledgeable on classic computing history from that time period. I was primarily going off the fact the semi conductor was built in the late 40's, and I would say we have the quantum version of that in both qubit and photonic based computing and they work and we have been developing on them for some time now. The key difference is that there are many more steps to get to the stage of making them useful. A transistor becamse useful extremely quickly and well in Quantum computing, these just haven't quite yet.