The Old Pre Quantum-Computing Days

Did you get that part about “booting-up” in chapter 3 of our History of 21^st Century Computing e-text? It says something about having to wait MINUTES before their computers would start up. I know they didn’t have Quantum Computing back then, but what’s that about? I mean, I’m pretty sure they weren’t still using tubes back then – that was 19^th century – no wait, 20^th century I think. I keep getting those 2 mixed up.

And then there was this part about “progress bars” where they would have to watch a bar fill in from before they could go on working. Do you think they did that on purpose? I mean, what’s the point of that? Maybe their programmers had a weird sense of humour back then. Oh wait, that still applies today. We are the Knights who say “Ni!” Haha, Yeah, that’s always going to be funny.

So can you imagine if they wanted to watch Holovision, they couldn’t just do it – they had to go find their computer, type in the name of the movie, then wait like hours for it to “download” and then watch it on their tiny 50” Plasma screens haha. I couldn’t live like that. Actually, it’s a wonder they were able to live at all, I mean with all that Cancer and disease they used to have. Their Deep Blue might have been OK at Chess, but could you imagine not using a Quantum Computer to come up with the most efficient sequence of nanobots to administer to cure cancer. That progress bar would be stuck at zero for an awfully long time.

And then there was that whole secrets thing. I know we celebrate January 20 as No More Wars, No More Secrets Day every year – but it’s still funny to imagine that they used to keep information from each other – on purpose! No one imagined that Quantum decryption would have such a far-reaching side effect, but I can’t even imagine a world of secrets and information hiding like they had. No wonder they were always fighting each other and waging wars. So silly when you think about it.

And if that wasn’t bad enough for them, they couldn’t even avoid floods and hurricanes because their pre-Quantum computers just couldn’t predict the exact time and place of an earthquake or other calamity. Ha, I even read that they tried to predict the weather with their pre-Quantum ways – and even though they were almost always wrong, people would actually read these predictions daily! I guess they had nothing better to do since they were always waiting for their progress bars and stuff.

You know, I don’t even know why we study this stuff anyway. I mean, now that there are Quantum Computers literally everywhere. In the walls, in our clothes, in our hair – it’s not like we’re ever going to revert back to our old ways again. But I guess it’s interesting to see how it all started. When Dieter Zirkler first completed his “Quantum Earth Simulator” in 2084 I guess it must have been great to be there. Imagine, just working in his garage, he was able to create the first truly usable Quantum Computer – and was able to simulate the earth well enough to accurately predict all weather for the next hundred years. And he did this on the first day. That must have been quite something to see for those 21^st century folks. And little did they know that was just the beginning. Oh well, they had to start somewhere.