[nosianu]

> Yet before that stage, they were a new tech

As far as I know - and we still had some tube radios at home when I grew up - they were used pretty much right away. For radios, and replacing mechanical relay switches, over which there obvious advantage was that since the tubes were not mechanical they would last longer, especially important in systems with lots of them.

So I'm not completely sure and somebody with definite knowledge should chime in, but I think they were not some "we have no idea what to do with this" but where useful from early on, as soon as the manufacturing method was solid. They were used for "normal" electronics well before they were used for the early computers. Even though Google search - which I just tried - also seems to have a bias and mostly associate those vacuum tubes with computers and forget all about the many other uses. It was the predecessor of diodes and transistors in addition to being better than mechanical relays.

https://www.engineering.com/story/vacuum-tubes-the-world-bef...

https://www.nps.gov/features/safr/feat0001/virtualships/vrmo...

(just one of the earliest commercial use cases as example for how short the period was between invention and wide-spread use)

> Dr. Lee deForest invented the vacuum tube in 1906. His tube, which he called the "audion," was first developed as a detector of radio waves and was quickly adopted by shipboard operators. Later experimentation, by deForest and others, showed the ability of the vacuum tube to generate radio signals with far greater precision than earlier systems. By 1914 the essentials of tube-based transmitters had been worked out.

[b112]

Sure, tube based transmitters had been, in a lab, "worked out". But we're talking about 20 years before commercial use really happened:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_radio#The_first_vac...

Radio existed (as you say) before the tube, but it took time to get the tube into real-world use. I guess this is somewhat like computing ; computing has existed in many forms, mechanical through to IC designs we have now.

But quantum? It's in a lab, and real-world applications are being worked out.

Paralleling back to radio again, people knew tubes would be useful, but it took 20+ years to make them mass producible, and make tubes usable, and redesign radios to use them. This, to me, sounds like quantum computing.

We can think of things I suppose to use them for (perhaps I was hasty on this point in my prior post), but we aren't there yet. And really, looking at the tube -- did anyone think they'd be used to make massive computers even?

I bet quantum computing will be the same way -- uses we're not aware of now.

[mdorazio]

You need to get your information from places other than Wikipedia. The vacuum tube was invented in 1904 and entered mass production by RCA in 1920 after several rounds of improvements. D-Wave started demonstrating its QC product in 2009 and here we are 13 years later with basically nothing. Are you going to tell us that QC will be commercially viable in three years?

[DubiousPusher]

It's honestly just a really bad analogy. Evacuated tubes were not pursued en-masse as an end unto themselves the way quantum computing is being pursued. Their development was as a side fascination for a handful of researchers or they were advanced because they were directly applicable to some goal of a researcher with maybe some mild tweaking. They were not a moonshot and they developed along similar lines as most useful "inventions" of today.

Quantum computing isn't even really comparable to ENIAC. Because the fundamental parts of ENIAC were known to be capable of doing what was required before the machine was built. There were analogus precursors to basically all the parts of the machine. The engineering challenges came with integration and at scale but fundamentally there wasn't a question of whether it could be done or not. We can't say the same yet of quantum computing.

IMO, quantum computing is more like space travel ca. the 1950s. We've got a lot of information: rockets look promising, we've learned a lot about the environment pilots will need to operate in up there, etc but no one really knows how far this can go and certainly we can't say if it will ever be profitable.

[YetAnotherNick]

> It's honestly just a really bad analogy. Evacuated tubes were not pursued en-masse as an end unto themselves the way quantum computing is being pursued

No, it's not. The Vacuum tube was sold for commercial and industrial use starting from 1915 for rectification. And most of the research spending went into it after it shown some promise from commercial application.

Not arguing though if pursuing something just for research is bad, just saying vacuum tube research was nothing like quantum computer research.

[DubiousPusher]

> just saying vacuum tube research was nothing like quantum computer research.

That's what I'm saying. Vacuum tubes had various evacuated tubes as their precursors which had uses in experimentation and industrial applications. This led to a step by step development process with continuous subsequent innovations building on each other. Quantum computing on the other hand is kind of an all or nothing proposition with many problems that must be solved which only produce value when functioning as part of the whole.

I don't think the development of classical computing is a good analogy either as the shared memory computer had various electromechanical precursors that had utility all of their own.

[dr_dshiv]

To clarify the analogy:

Quantum computing with todays technology :: Classical computing in the early era of vacuum tubes

The point of the analogy is to communicate that we are at an early stage of development. Also, I just like vacuum tubes.

[oldgradstudent]

> Quantum computing with todays technology :: Classical computing in the early era of vacuum tubes

There's still a big difference.

Even in the earliest era of computing with vacuum tubes (and even before), they were building machines that produced useful results: artillery tables, H-bomb simulations, cryptanalysis, etc.

Most things these machines were used for were simply impractical without them.

There's nothing even remotely analogous with quantum computing.

[dr_dshiv]

Well, to be fair: quantum computers can do practical computations—but because “normal” computers are so unbelievably well developed, it is not practical to do them with quantum computers.

The earliest era of computing was mechanical. The mechanism of thermionic transmission (vacuum tubes) was invented by Edison in 1883. The Colossus computer, with thousands of vacuum tubes, was the first practical use of vacuum tubes for computation, in 1943. We cannot yet assemble thousands of qubits together. Once we can do that, we will be able to perform many useful functions. However, even with thousands of qubits, many of the functions will be more practical to run on a classical computer (because classical computers are amazing and continue to develop).