Faraday and Babbage: Semiconductors and Computing in 1833

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31996743 https://westurner.github.io/hnlog/#comment-31996743 :

> Qubit#Physical_implementations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit#Physical_implementations

> - note the "electrons" row of the table

>> See also: "Quantum logic gate" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_logic_gate

People who are just slightly ahead of their time tend to have competitors, people who looked at the same world and have essentially the same idea, and then it's down to whether we think Liebniz or Newton invented it, or whether we confusingly credit one but rely on the techniques of the other (see also Edison & Tesla).

I think history has unfortunately proven Babbage a dreamer. He had no contemporary who could swoop in and profit from his slow progress, because his work was not obvious/compelling to anyone else of his caliber.

Computing as we know it (post Moore's law) depends on semiconductor technology. It is quite a stretch to suppose that, if Babbage had produced a working device, then the period of Moore's law expansion would have occurred 100 years earlier, given that it depended on the development of semiconductor devices, which in turn depended on developing a quantum theory of condensed matter.