Question: When you say you design new computers, what do you mean? Are these computers for general use or experiments?

Robert Woolfson answered on 17 Jun 2013:

Short answer – I don’t know, but then I don’t think anyone else does either.

Long answer – when the first computer was built, it was built to do maths. After people started to think about it and have a play with it, they came up with all kinds of uses and 60 years later we have smartphones and tablets.

I personally expect quantum computing to follow a similar trend. The first ones will be ridiculously big and expensive and will be used by researchers and big businesses and most people won’t see any benefits. As the computers get a bit older and better understood, they’ll get smaller, more practical and start to find more general uses.