My father's misconceptions about kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes always gave me the giggles when I was a youngster. "How could you confuse a 64 kilobyte machine with a 64 gigabyte machine?" I would think to myself. Dad always went on to say how when I got to be his age children would laugh at me how I confuse technologies.
The first time I heard of terabytes, I must've been 13 or 14. The logical procession of this would be the standard metric prefixes; petabytes would surely come along soon. I figured it must go on forever and ever. Until today.
I've been reading about Quantum mechanics in a book recently and (although it is probably some sort of fallacy) I feel like I hear the "Q" word everywhere now. Today I learned about Quantum Computing.
You see those kilobytes, megabytes, and gigabytes and forevers and evers are made up of "bits" of information, 1's and 0's. This method of computing must be fine as it can go on forever. But it must've taken someone far superior in knwoledge than me to see a problem in using these bits of information. They said "Why can't it be both 1's and 0's at the same time?" This is Quantum Computing. This is the future. This is a future-child giggling at me.
Instead of proceeding up the scale of metric prefixes, computing has invented a new root word, the "Qubit" that can be 1's and 0's at the same time. There is a Quantum Computer on the market right now that runs at 128 Qubits, and you can get one for about $9 Million. Perhaps a 64 MegaQubit iPod will come out in 50 years. This is Quantum Computing. This is the future. This is the future-Me laughing at my past-Self. And that is Quantum Laughter.
Originally published via Facebook Notes, May 20, 2014, by JSRaadt, with minor revisions.
