Posted on 03/04/2020 6:20:30 AM PST by Red Badger
The news: Honeywell, a US company best known for its home thermostats, has announced that it has built the world’s most powerful quantum computer. While all eyes were on IBM and Google, which last year knocked heads over quantum supremacy, Honeywell has been working quietly on quantum tech that it plans to make available to clients via the internet in the next three months.
How it works: Most quantum computers, including those being developed by IBM and Google, are built around superconducting qubits, which use supercooled circuits. Honeywell’s quantum computer uses a different technology, called ion traps, which hold ions—the computer’s qubits—in place with electromagnetic fields. Superconducting quantum chips are faster, but ion traps are more accurate and hold their quantum state for longer.
Honeywell also says it can hit pause on a quantum computation, read off the state of a qubit, and then restart the computation down a different path depending on the result. This would make it possible to execute something like an “if” statement mid-computation—a fundamental part of coding languages.
Honeywell posted details of how its system works to the arXiv pre-print repository yesterday. The firm claims its computer will be twice as powerful as IBM’s machine, Q System One, when it launches, although that particular claim is likely to be contested.
Partnerships: Honeywell also has partnerships with JPMorgan Chase and Microsoft, which will provide quantum computing algorithms and general computing know-how, as well as investments in smaller quantum computing specialists.
Do we believe it? There are good reasons to. Honeywell might seem like an outsider in this space, but it is a massive company with a wealth of industrial expertise that goes well beyond thermostats, especially in many high-precision sectors such as defense and aerospace. Its experience working with vacuums and cryogenics is likely to have played a big part in its efforts to build a quantum computer, which draws on many more areas of engineering than a regular computer. This suggests the smart money for next-gen quantum tech should be on industrial conglomerates like Honeywell just as much as on traditional tech giants like IBM and Google.
Still, for now this is just an announcement. We will have to wait a few more months to see what Honeywell’s quantum computer can actually do.
and the 32-bit Sigma 7
32 bit!!!!
My first PC was 16MB and it was SOOOO SLOW!!
Fascinating page about companies and computers that I did not know about.
Xerox lost hundreds of millions in the long run from that acquisition. Wow. That was back then $$!!
Thank you.
I’m sitting in a building built by Honeywell in Phoenix in 1980. I hired on at this facility in 1974 to work on the GCOS 3 OS and HW.
I worked with some of the Xerox engineers after the take-over.
We migrated GCOS 3 to GCOS 8 in the late 1970’s. GCOS 8 included new-fangled features such as “virtual memory” and “segmentation”. For several years, I was the plant instructor on the new hardware architecture as well as my design duties. My students included all the new hires in SW and HW.
I just installed a GCOS 8 system on a hardware emulator which is hosted on a RHEL 6 Linux system hosted on a KVM virtual machine on an Intel based hardware platform designed and built by Bull, a French company.
One of my first jobs as a computer operator back in the 70’s was on a Honeywell 200 tape operating system.
“https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeywell_200";
That's cool, what's it like? Is it a command line O/S, or does it have a GUI?
Is it Unix-like?
GCOS 8 is a mainframe system. Vintage mainframes are used by governments and the financial sector. The system is inherently command line, but its service processor is a GUI based system running on Windows 7.
Mainframes run programs in “batches”. The programs are usually written in COBOL and post-process the databases both for reporting, billing, restocking, and database management purposes. These batches of programs are usually run at night when the online needs of the system are greatly reduced. Hundreds, or even thousands, of batch programs can run every night.
During the day, transaction processing is king. Transaction processing terminals could be screens at a teller station or specialized programs to interact with a bank ATM. It would not be unusual to support 3,500 logged in terminals in a single system. Note, the system running these 3,500 terminals had only 4 CPUs and only a few gigabytes of system memory. During the 1980’s, these CPUs had a “clock speed” at least 1000 times slower than the speed of the processor on your phone.
The last leg of the three-legged stool is “time sharing”. That is to support people writing and submitting the programs for the batch and transaction processing systems. It is the closest thing to logging into a linux/unix system. 100 to 400 logged in users was typical. Today, staffs are usually smaller.
What a long strange trip THAT’S been . . .
I am not sure that Heisenberg would agree to this ...
Would this be faster than my VIC-20?
LOL!........................
Back in the day, the main players outside of IBM were known as the BUNCH; Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell.
And a second CRT for output.
Univac I’ve heard of. I’m not sure from where but it was a long time ago.
It’s cool seeing what was going on in the 60s and 70s with technology :)
Each step led up to the next one and to what we have today.
FWIW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SDS_Sigma_series
The school added a Harris Slash 7 (24 bit specialty computer with “Unix” installed for gp computing).
My senior year, they were bringing online a DECSYSTEM-20 to replace the “Honeywell”.
Naturally, my first job out of school was programming on an 8085.
Memory size increments for all SDS/XDS/Xerox computers are stated in kWords, not kBytes.
Cool :) I never knew that.
I didn’t know a lot of the information on that page.
It’s fascinating
Yes, Honeywell was one of the Seven Dwarfs, and acquired the remains of the others, becoming known as the Used Computer Company. I think Honeywell sold out to France’s Bull.
PL1? It never really went main stream.
In school, we went from Fortran to Pascal. Everybody learned Fortran because practically all computer companies had to provide it if they wanted to sell to the US Gov at the time.
· String Theory Ping List ·
"The truth is usually just an excuse for a lack of imagination." -- Elim Garak
· Join · Bookmark · Topics · Google ·
· View or Post in 'blog · post a topic · subscribe ·
#32 IBM, Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell.
None are big players now in computers.
Hopefully Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc go away.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
