May 4, 2016 IBM puts a five-qubit quantum computer online for the public

Until 2016 a quantum computer could be used only by the researchers who built it, in the laboratory where it stood. On May 4 that year IBM put one online.

Through a website called the IBM Quantum Experience, anyone could design a circuit and run it on a five-qubit superconducting processor at IBM's research center in Yorktown Heights, New York. IBM described it as the first time quantum computing had been made available to the public.

The processor was small, and the experiments it could run were short. But the barrier between the machine and its users had gone: students, programmers and researchers who had never entered a quantum laboratory could now program real hardware and see the results.

In March 2017 IBM released Qiskit, an open-source toolkit for writing such programs, and other companies followed with cloud services of their own. Access over the internet became the usual way to use a quantum computer.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) Research announced today that for the first time ever it is making quantum computing available to members of the public, who can access and run experiments on IBM's quantum processor.