1.5. A brief history of quantum computation

The first revolution was the formulation of the postulates in the early 1900s. Following the first revolution, in 1936, Alan Turing created a theoretical model for automatic machines, now called Turing machines, which laid the theoretical foundations of computer science. In 1980, Paul Benioff published a paper that described a quantum mechanical model of Turing machines [Benioff]. With this and the advancements in quantum chemistry, the foundations were in place for quantum computers.

The first time that quantum computation was discussed within the broader scientific community was when Richard Feynman gave a keynote lecture at a conference called the Physics of Computation held in May 1981 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). This keynote lecture discussed harnessing quantum physics to build a quantum computer [Preskill_40y]. In May 2021, on the anniversary of the conference, IBM organized an event called QC40: Physics of Computation...