The New Quantum Era

Chapter 2. Don’t Watson My Quantum

Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.

Stuart Brand

IBM’s peevish “well, actually” response to Google’s supremacy experiment went beyond mere objections to the experiment’s design and Google’s resulting claims. The company felt it had been crucially involved in the roots of the field and an active investment that went back at least twice as long as this bunch of Silicon Valley startup kids. Given its legacy of contributions right down to coining the phrase “quantum information theory,” one could understand the feeling of having called dibs on the emerging technology. There was another emotional response that Google’s move to grab the quantum spotlight elicited, a deep gut reaction culturally unique to the IBM of the 21st century, best described as “oh no, not again.”

While IBM itself has a history that stretches back over 100 years as a manufacturer of recordkeeping and measuring systems like meat scales and punch card readers founded in 1911, its identity as a computer company began with its IBM Research division. Founded in 1945, contemporaneously with the birth of classical computing, IBM’s original research teams focused on the fundamental science that underpins the technologies derived from information theory. As the effort grew from its origins in a lab at Columbia University to purpose-built buildings of its own, the research division leveraged chemistry, physics, and other ...