quantum computing timeline The 80s.

1980

Paul Benioff describes the first quantum mechanical model of a computer. In this work, Benioff showed that a computer could operate under the laws of quantum mechanics by describing a Schrödinger equation description of Turing machines, laying a foundation for further work in quantum computing. The paper was submitted in June 1979 and published in April 1980.

Yuri Manin briefly motivates the idea of quantum computing. He pained a clear picture of what it would entail.

Tommaso Toffoli introduces the reversible Toffoli gate, which, together with the NOT and XOR gates provides a universal set for reversible classical computation.

Picture: Toffoli gate, a universal reversible logic gate, which means that any classical reversible circuit can be constructed from Toffoli gates. It is also known as the "controlled-controlled-not" gate, which describes its action.

1981

At the First Conference on the Physics of Computation, held at MIT in May, Paul Benioff and Richard Feynman give talks on quantum computing. Benioff's built on his earlier 1980 work showing that a computer can operate under the laws of quantum mechanics. The talk was titled “Quantum mechanical Hamiltonian models of discrete processes that erase their own histories: application to Turing machines”. In Feynman's talk, he observed that it appeared to be impossible to efficiently simulate an evolution of a quantum system on a classical computer, and he proposed a basic model for a quantum computer.

1982

Paul Benioff further develops his original model of a quantum mechanical Turing machine.

William Wootters and Wojciech Zurek, and independently Dennis Dieks rediscover the no-cloning theorem.

1984

Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard employ Wiesner's conjugate coding for distribution of cryptographic keys.