News Commodore 64 outperforms IBM's quantum systems — 1 MHz computer said to be faster, more efficient, and decently accurate

[Admin]

A paper released during the SIGBOVIK 2024 conference details an attempt to simulate the IBM ‘quantum utility’ experiment on a Commodore 64. The authors claim the experiment was a success.

Commodore 64 outperforms IBM's quantum systems — 1 MHz computer said to be faster, more efficient, and decently accurate : Read more

 

[vanadiel007]

The Commodore 64, good times. Together with the Amiga 500 hands down my 2 most favorite computers. RIP guys.

 

[kyzarvs]

The Commodore 64, good times. Together with the Amiga 500 hands down my 2 most favorite computers. RIP guys.

It took a very long time for true multi-tasking to become as efficient as the Amiga chipset - the design was superb, such a shame there was no investment.

 

[Blastomonas]

It took a very long time for true multi-tasking to become as efficient as the Amiga chipset - the design was superb, such a shame there was no investment.

Agreed. I learned that one of the death knells for the Amiga was that they refused to adopt MS office. They wanted to develop their own.

Anyway. Fun article. Still waiting on that real quantum breakthrough!

 

[NinoPino]

1st of April ?😀

 

[Findecanor]

BTW. The top image in the article is a 3D render of the "Commodore 64x" which is a mITX PC case with mechanical keyboard, merely shaped like a Commodore 64 breadbin. The keyboard layout is different, adapted for a PC.

It took a very long time for true multi-tasking to become as efficient as the Amiga chipset

Preemptive multitasking did not depend on the custom chipset: you'd need only a hardware timer that could trigger an interrupt, and in the Amiga: that was in one of the CIA chips. Those were in essence variants of the ones in the C64.

It was otherwise all software: Carl Sassenrath's "Exec" handled interrupts, task scheduling and message passing and the framework that allowed dynamically loaded libraries and device drivers.

R.J. Mical's "Intuition" had the windows, menus and "gadgets" ("controls"/"widgets") run in Intuition's task instead of requiring message round-trips to the application for every user interaction like on other systems: This made using multiple tasks very responsive, independent of how slow the applications actually were.
That the Blitter was used to move windows around and scroll window contents helped of course, but was not critical.

Agreed. I learned that one of the death knells for the Amiga was that they refused to adopt MS office. They wanted to develop their own.

You mean: Microsoft wanted to develop their own windowing system? They were apparently busy with Windows 1.0 when the Amiga launched, yes. It was not the only or even the first windowing system on top of MS-DOS at the time though, so I'd think that Microsoft regarded those as more close competitors.

The general belief back in the day was that Microsoft would have ported Microsoft Office to the Amiga had the Amiga platform appeared to be viable in the long run, with good sales figures also in the US and a strong company behind it that believed in the platform, but...

AFAIK, there were some pretty viable word processors and spreadsheets for the Amiga.
Microsoft Office did not become dominant even on the PC until the mid-90's when Commodore went bankrupt. I'd think that in about '93, the dominant PC word processor was still WordPerfect: both in DOS and MS Windows 3.1, and the dominant spreadsheet was Lotus-1-2-3.
BTW. I believe the DOS version of WordPerfect was even ported to Amiga: but a WYSIWYG version never was.

 

[Amdlova]

Feeling nostalgic these days... windows 95, commodore computers... just brought the 1999 silver game on steam... man need to get a 4:3 screen to fulfill the vibe

 

[niceguy1]

the ides of april. i had a vic 20 with 4k of ram (i believe). cartridge side scrolling games and basic programming - i also had a 300 baud modem. yeah im old.

 

[SunMaster]

Agreed. I learned that one of the death knells for the Amiga was that they refused to adopt MS office. They wanted to develop their own.

I think the main problem was Commodore, the management. And qc issues.

But the Amiga was an amazing design, I loved both my A1000 and A2000.

 

[35below0]

Windows still hasn't come round to the idea of hiding files the user doesn't ever want to interact with. Or the idea of non-uniform icon sizes.
They did try the idea of applying wallpapers to individual drawers folders... It was not a pretty sight.

 

[Sluggotg]

The C64 was my first computer. Then the Amigas came out. I jumped to the A2000. Loved Commodore but it was ran into the ground by Irving Gould. He owned controlling interest in the company and kicked out Jack Tramiel. It was sad to see Commodore go away.

Obviously I still have C64s/Amigas and many other models of old computers. Computing in the 80s was very exciting. It still is but in a different way.

 

[Joseph_138]

Just lovely. Now the price for used C64's is going to go up, and the availability will go down.

 

[bluvg]

BTW. The top image in the article is a 3D render of the "Commodore 64x" which is a mITX PC case with mechanical keyboard, merely shaped like a Commodore 64 breadbin. The keyboard layout is different, adapted for a PC.

I was going to say, where are the little graphics on the front sides of the keys? And the F1-F12 (?) indicators make little sense on the number keys, since the Fn keys (F1-F8) are the gray ones on the right side....

 

[Steve Nord_]

the ides of april. i had a vic 20 with 4k of ram (i believe). cartridge side scrolling games and basic programming - i also had a 300 baud modem. yeah im old.

Yeah keep submitting those 4k demos to Pöuet! You're only as old as you're not running out of (snort) page memory...but importantly also not out of swap I suppose.

 

[Blastomonas]

I managed to maintain the faith until about 1999. Upto this point the Amiga 1200 was my daily machine.

I remember the excitement of getting my first printer and being able to print custom floppy disk labels for no real reason. Also the joy of discovering what was in the latest editions of Amiga Format, cu etc..

Always hoped to own an A4000, but alas, it wasn't meant to be.

Whilst computing is still interesting, it's not the same.

 

[Steve Nord_]

I was going to say, where are the little graphics on the front sides of the keys? And the F1-F12 (?) indicators make little sense on the number keys, since the Fn keys (F1-F8) are the gray ones on the right side....

Yes that, and maybe how about a split silent keyboard with haptic feedback (piezo driven) a fingerprint scanner set with IR spectrometer and some dials and a nub mouse in there? Fire up a reasonable FPGA in there and emulate everything 6502, 6803...68o6o/MPU...NXP...XMOS.ai (not sure about the Qubes client fitting?) Power it off solar DC rails and ultracaps? What fills the centronics interface tho?

Needs to be called West Chester Computational Supremacy. (Maybe collect South of Market Linear Anyon Collider cred. too.)

That which can in emulation lie can totes perish in centuries' time, aye.

 

[Steve Nord_]

Whilst computing is still interesting, it's not the same.

My brother in UAE (er, Emirates optional, I do mean the emulation thing c.f. WinUAE, FS-UAE) and arXiv, have you not seen architecture papers? But also I imagine, demoparty.net ? Got Tix for the 21st?

Joining a local computer user group...even quantum, does appeal as an immediate admission to schizoid disorder. Maybe not the neuroatypocality you wanted. The undergrad classes have a correlate disorder in that they are all about a piece 🧩 of software with no meristem credential. It's like yo join my introductory Jenkins class, it's in Ruwanda...

 

[Steve Nord_]

Agreed. I learned that one of the death knells for the Amiga was that they refused to adopt MS office. They wanted to develop their own.

Anyway. Fun article. Still waiting on that real quantum breakthrough!

Definitely not important to adopt MS Office any more than you apply to art school with a portfolio on a MD : Data drive cartridge. Fair to say the C= supply toolchain (years into Chapter 7 receivership) wasn't chasing solid state capacitors when they were going bad. Can't much blame the CEOs trying to run West Chester, PA things from the Bahamas for not making it work.

On the other hand there are a bunch of startups around neuromorphic 2T materials now and Intel NPU hasn't necessarily put forth an unassailable timeline for their Gala stuff? Exciting computing, whether it needs to be gelled by revulsions at MSN (or just that riot taskbar left) remains to be seen.

As for more canon quantum computing breakthroughs, really? Waiting on...? Nature (publishing) hasn't replicated their entire periodical catalog with quantum as one of the words and OA Gold as 3 more, but the ones that do have that first word in there aren't out of er, print. Just saw one such breakthrough that tagged itself as machining. Optomechanics, optronics, correlated electron systems? Nah.

 

[Leptir]

Microsoft Office did not become dominant even on the PC until the mid-90's when Commodore went bankrupt. I'd think that in about '93, the dominant PC word processor was still WordPerfect: both in DOS and MS Windows 3.1, and the dominant spreadsheet was Lotus-1-2-3.

I don't remember either WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 ever being dominant on Windows.

 

[35below0]

WordPerfect was, for a time. Then Word began to pull away as it got better.

Lotus was a factor. I don't think it was ever dominant but it was a player. Sort of like Corel Photo Paint and Photoshop. Neither was dominant for a long time. One day Photo Paint was relegated from competition and that was that. Corel Draw was a different tool altogether.
Lotus was just dropped at one point.

 

[SunMaster]

WordPerfect was, for a time. Then Word began to pull away as it got better.

Lotus was a factor. I don't think it was ever dominant but it was a player. Sort of like Corel Photo Paint and Photoshop. Neither was dominant for a long time. One day Photo Paint was relegated from competition and that was that. Corel Draw was a different tool altogether.
Lotus was just dropped at one point.

Lotus 1-2-3 was THE spreadsheet, and was dominant for years.

 

[qommodore64]

Hi, this is the author of the paper. Thanks for the coverage! I can confirm that it is not a joke, in that I actually simulated the quantum computation on a Commodore 64. Of course, it is a joke in the sense that I only did it because it was funny. I'd like to emphasise that this probably did not come as a surprise to experts in the field (the papers I cited point out how this particular quantum computation is easy to approximate). The papyrus bit was a joke, I can provide actual source code on request.

 

[bluvg]

I don't remember either WordPerfect or Lotus 1-2-3 ever being dominant on Windows.

I think WordPerfect for Windows (as opposed to WordPerfect for DOS, run on Windows) was not dominant. My understanding is that they had to rush out a buggy version for Windows because they had bet on the wrong horse (OS/2).