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Comment by kowdermeister | Hacker News Reader

Even if this is the case, at first people were scratching their head looking at the transistor what it might be good for.

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No, the transistor replaced the vacuum tube, which everyone was already using. When the transistor was invented everyone rushed to use it because it was clear what it was good for.

No, first customer of the transistor was the government because they were the only ones who could afford it.

Yes, and the reason the government rushed to it is because they wanted the absolute best technology (that was orders of magnitude better than anything else) and would pay for it to have a leg up over their enemies. If they were cheap right when they came out, everyone would have bought them.

My point is that QC-s have the potential to be as revolitonary as transistors were. Yet we are at the level when transistors were mostly used to make radios portable. Thus it's not really justified to mock them as lame factoring devices.

That's not how I read your comment. It clearly tries to suggest that when the transistor was first invented people did not know what to do with it.

I think the MASER/LASER would have been a far better example.

I read that somewhere (can't recall the source) that it was a nice gadget, but it wasn't an overnight sensation. You are right, MASER/LASER is a better analogy.

If you are talking about transistors, when they were invented the only other alternatives were triodes (vacuum tubes) or mechanical relays. Both were orders of magnitude less reliable and slower in terms of switching speed. When transistors were invented it was a mad dash to get them cheap and small enough to replace everything else, because everyone could tell they were the future. It took 9 years between the first transistor and receiving the Nobel Prize for it.

I don't know where you read that but that is not the story that I'm familiar with.

Applications for the transistor were known before the device even existed.

The problems were first to make them reliably, then to make them in quantity and finally to make them cheap enough. All those were overcome and the revolution that followed has not stopped even today.

Perhaps a Leyden jar, or Aeolipyle. Novelties with great potential. Or perhaps, they're just a drinking bird kind of novelty - i don't think so, but maybe. QM is rock solid, but it doesn't tie together well with our other theories about the world. Maybe knowing more will make the error correction easier somehow.

I kinda think we're in the difference engine phase of quantum computing. Same problems as Babbage building a neat thing, but we're missing some details and our tools aren't really sharp enough to make a good one.

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