Timeline / 05
Six decades of quantum,
on a single line.
From Feynman's 1981 hunch to the fault-tolerant machines of the 2040s — every milestone that took quantum computing from thought experiment to industry.
19812026 · Now2040
Now
2026You are here
The NISQ-to-utility transition
Hundreds of qubits, real customers, real revenue — but still noisy. The race is on to suppress errors faster than they accumulate.
1000+
physical qubits shipping
The full story, milestone by milestone.
13 entries
- Theory1981Richard Feynman · MIT0qubits ever built
- Theory1985David Deutsch · Oxford∞possibilities in superposition
- Algorithm1994Peter Shor · Bell Labs2048bits Shor could crack
- Algorithm1996Lov Grover · Bell Labs√Ninstead of N steps
- Hardware1998IBM · Berkeley · MIT · Stanford2physical qubits
- Industry2011D-Wave Systems128annealing qubits
- Access2016IBM Quantum Experience5qubits, online, free
- Milestone2019Google · Sycamore200svs 10,000 years
- Error correction2023QuEra · Harvard · MIT48logical qubits
- Now2026The NISQ-to-utility transition1000+physical qubits shipping
- Forecast2029Forecast · multiple vendors100useful logical qubits
- Forecast2033Forecast · IBM / Google / IonQ10k+logical qubits
- Horizon2040Forecast · Horizon1M+logical qubits
Forecasts beyond 2026 reflect public roadmaps from IBM, Google Quantum AI, IonQ, Quantinuum, PsiQuantum and QuEra. Reality may surprise us — that is half the point.