Feb 13, 2007 D-Wave demonstrates Orion, which it calls the first commercial quantum computer

Through the early 2000s quantum computers remained laboratory experiments with a handful of qubits. Then, on February 13, 2007, a Canadian start-up called D-Wave Systems presented a machine it described as "the world's first commercial quantum computer."

The demonstration took place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The machine, called Orion, had 16 qubits on a superconducting chip made of niobium, and on stage it solved problems such as a Sudoku puzzle.

Orion was not the kind of machine DiVincenzo had described. It did not run arbitrary sequences of gates; it was built for one kind of task, searching for the best solution to an optimization problem, using an approach known as quantum annealing.

D-Wave released few technical details and no peer-reviewed evidence that its results depended on quantum effects. Researchers such as Scott Aaronson and Umesh Vazirani called the claims misleading, noting that Orion showed no advantage over ordinary computers. The question of what counts as a quantum computer had acquired a commercial edge.

On February 13, D-Wave Systems, a startup based in Burnaby, British Columbia, claimed to have demonstrated "the world's first commercial quantum computer."