The New Quantum Era

Chapter 6. Universes of Information

In the development of ideas, primitive pre-ideas often lead continuously to modern scientific concepts...It is, for instance, possible to trace the development of the idea of an infectious disease from a primitive belief in demons, through the idea of a disease miasma, to the theory of the pathogenic agent.

David Deutsch

By the time the motley crew assembled at Endicott House in 1981 to debate whether quantum mechanics might be useful for computation, classical computing was settling into a form that would remain familiar to us to this day. The mainframe and terminal were giving way to the personal computer with monitor, mouse, and keyboard, and the Osborne 1, the first portable computer, had just been launched, pointing toward our mobile computing present (admittedly, at 25 pounds, it wasn’t very mobile). From the perspective in the mid-2020s, the computers and networks of the ’80s seem feeble, with bandwidth, memory, and storage measured in kilobytes, not gigabytes. However, that perspective is due to the extremely rapid rate of progress the technologies were enjoying. Thanks to Moore’s law, the 68,000 transistors in Motorola’s eponymous 68K chip launched at the beginning of the 1980s was eclipsed by the Intel 80486’s 1.5 million by the end of the decade.

With that barreling engine of progress at full tilt, it seems peculiar that anyone would be looking for alternative approaches to computation, as were the Endicott House conference-goers. ...