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Comment by roflmaostc | Hacker News Reader

Why do you think so?

Your words sounds like what people said in the 40s and 50s about computers.

In the 40s and 50s programmable general-purpose electronic computers were solving problems.

Ballistics tables, decryption of enemy messages, and more. Early programmable general-purpose electronic computers, from the moment they were turned on could solve problems in minutes that would take human computers months or years. In the 40s, ENIAC proved the feasibility of thermonuclear weaponry.

By 1957 the promise and peril of computing entered popular culture with the Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn film "Desk Set" where a computer is installed in a library and runs amok, firing everybody, all while romantic shenanigans occur. It was sponsored by IBM and is one of the first instances of product placement in films.

People knew "electronic brains" were the future the second they started spitting out printouts of practically unsolvable problems instantly-- they just didn't (during your timeframe) predict the invention and adoption of the transistor and its miniaturization, which made computers ubiquitous household objects.

Even the quote about the supposed limited market for computers trotted out from time-to-time to demonstrate the hesitance of industry and academia to adopt computers is wrong.

In 1953 when Thomas Watson said that "there's only a market for five computers" what he actually said was "When we developed the IBM 701 we created a customer list of 20 organizations who might want it and because it is so expensive we expected to only sign five deals, but we ended up signing 18" (paraphrased).

Militaries, universities, and industry all wanted all of the programmable general-purpose electronic computers they could afford the second it became available because they all knew that it could solve problems.

Included for comparison is a list of problems that quantum computing has solved:

Exactly. There were many doubts about exactly how useful computers would be. But they were already proving their usefulness in some fields.

The current state of quantum computers is so much worse than that. It's not just that they have produced zero useful results. It's that when these quantum computers do produce results on toy problems, the creators are having a very hard time even proving the results actually came from quantum effects.

I don't think that you can really make that comparison. "Conventional" computers had more proven practical usage (especially by nation states) in the 40s/50s than quantum computing does today.

By the 1940s and 50s, computers were already being used for practical and useful work, and calculating machines had a _long_ history of being useful, and it didn't take that long between the _idea_ of a calculating machine and having something that people paid for and used because it had practical value.

They've been plugging along at quantum computers for decades now and have not produced a single useful machine (although a lot of the math and science behind it has been useful for theoretical physics).

Survivor bias. Just because a certain thing seemed like a scam and turned out useful does not mean all things that seem like a scam will turn out useful.

GP's comment didn't suggest that every supposed scam will turn out to be useful.

Quite the opposite, in fact. It was pointing out that some supposed scams do turn out to be useful.

GP is just blatantly wrong. Electronic computation was NEVER considered a "scam".

The Navy, Air Force, government, private institutions, etc didn't dump billions of funding into computers because they thought they were overrated.

You can't put a man on the Sun just because you put one on the Moon.

Do you have any citations for that?

https://www.ittc.ku.edu/~evans/stuff/famous.html

Do you have any citations for that?

I'm not the OP, but when you're of a certain age, you don't need citations for that. Memory serves. And my family was saying those sorts of things and teasing me about being into computers as late as the 1970's.

I can attest to the fact that people who didn't understand computers at all were questioning the value of spending time on them long after the 1970s. The issue is that there are people today who do understand quantum computing that are questioning their value and that's not a great sign.

In the 1970s both my parents were programming computers professionaly.

Computing was already a huge industry. Just IBM's revenues were in the multi billion dollar range in the 1970s. And a billion dollar in the 1970s was A LOT of money in the 1970s.

When you’re of a certain age, time has likely blurred your memories. Citation becomes more important then. Source: me I’m an old SOB.