Quantum computing's ENIAC

One of the earliest electronic general-purpose computers ever made, the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (or, ENIAC) was a monster of a machine. Brought online in 1946, ENIAC eventually grew to include 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7200 crystal diodes, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints. It weighed over 27 tonnes, consumed 150 kW of electricity, ran programs from punch cards (a huge leap forward from earlier models of computer), cost 6.1 million inflation-adjusted US dollars, and had roughly the computational power of a scientific calculator.

It's now 71 years later, and today's personal computing technology bears very little resemblance to ENIAC. A modern smartphone can weigh as little as 155 g (5.47 oz, or 0.00000574% of ENIAC), yet packs 1300 times ENIAC's computing power into that tiny package. Compared to today's computing technology, ENIAC is a dinosaur, and it would be virtually useless for any modern computing application, but ENIAC is also the start of the modern computer era; something like ENIAC must first exist, in order for our modern information age to be possible.

Knowing this, I have to admit that it gave me something of a frisson to see what the current state of quantum computing looks like, courtesy of Linus Tech Tips:

Voilà! The ENIAC of our age.