[Cryptography] CADET, Why full-fledged quantum computers might always be five years away

[John Levine]

According to Steven M. Bellovin <smb at cs.columbia.edu>:
>> And yet the 1620 was described as a digital computer, and was used for the kinds of things we use digital computers for to this day. 
>It even came with a FORTRAN compiler.
>>
>Well, early 1960s. (Wikipedia claims 1959 introduction.) But you missed the biggie: it couldn't do arithmetic on its own. Rather, there
>were tables in RAM giving the results of addition and subtraction operations.

That was the 1620 model I, which had lookup tables you could change.
The model II had hardware arithmetic but enough people had used the
lookup table trick to do octal arithmetic that IBM offered an optional
octal feature. See the Wikipedia article.

I think it would be fairly difficult to simulate a 1620 on a quantum computer.

R's,
John
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