Roughly 80 years ago, the world was at war. Under a shroud of secrecy, scientists in the U.K., Germany and the U.S. were creating the first electronic computers. These computers filled rooms, demanded vast quantities of electricity and enabled previously impossible calculations. Few of the people involved could have imagined that decades later, computers orders of magnitude more powerful would fit in a backpack — yet that's exactly what happened.
So, as we sit on the threshold of genuinely useful quantum computing, could we ever see quantum laptops? "I think it's possible," Mario Gely, a quantum computing researcher at the University of Oxford, told Live Science. "It's highly speculative, but I can't think of a fundamental reason why a quantum laptop would not be possible."
