History of quantum computing: 12 key moments that shaped the future of computers

Quantum computing has gone from an academic curiosity to a multi-billion-dollar industry in less than half a century.

Paul Benioff published the first description of a quantum computer in 1980 .

Richard Feynman popularized quantum computing in 1981 with a talk at the first Physics of Computation Conference in 1981 .

In 1994 , the first killer use case for quantum computers was the factoring algorithm on quantum hardware.

In 1999 , the birth of the superconducting quantum computer was announced.

In 2011 , IBM made quantum computers available over the cloud.

Superconducting qubits are now used by many of the leading quantum computing companies, including Google and IBM .

The launch of the first commercially available quantum computer by Canadian company D-Wave in May 2011 heralded the start of the quantum computing industry.

In September 2019 , Google used 53 qubits to perform a calculation in 200 seconds that it claimed would take a supercomputer roughly 10,000 years to complete.