What will quantum computers look like: size, components, power needs, core, supercooling, portability?
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It's way too early to ask this, so use your fictional imagination.  The application is likely to be extremely dense memory.  More benefit would come from using it for computations for which it is suited.  To build a von Neuman architecture machine, you would need to do a tremendous amount of work just to be as good as today's traditional technology.  I don't think it's particularly suited to neural net computation, and that technology is already short of applications.  NMRI is extremely unlikely, since it enormously increases the cost without any obvious benefit.  The technology is far too immature to answer the other questions.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware
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The science and technology of building electronic circuits and devices from single atoms and molecules.
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Hard to say considering computers are updated very often. Take in the fact all the different companies out there. but here's something to ponder on.\nNewest computer model will help with design of future speedy electronics\nIn the past three years, more and more chip manufacturers have adopted a computer model created at Berkeley to design and simulate the operation of new integrated circuits -- computer chips -- before going to the expense of fabricating them. The BSIM, Berkeley Short-channel IGFET Model, can model the operation of single transistors or millions linked in an integrated circuit, like a computer processor. \n\nNow EECS professor Chenming Hu, the model's lead developer, has developed a new version, BSIM4. The model was released last week for use by the semiconductor industry. \n\n"It paves the way for engineers to design computer chips with blinding speed and wireless electronics that communicate at higher frequencies," said Hu.
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well, to some extent the answer to this question depends largely on the nature of the nanostructure and what its function will be.  in some cases, the tunneling is a problem, but in other cases, the structures are designed specifically to take advantage of tunneling effects.\n\n(i also notice you wrote atomic tunneling - did you mean electron tunneling?  an atom *can* tunnel, theoretically, but because it is a composite object, the probability is extraordinarily low that all of the particles in the atom will tunnel at once.  \n\nalso, the particles in the nucleus are very small, very light, and very tightly bound.. as such their tunneling lengths are much smaller than the size of the atom itself.  so while it is possible that the nucleus could be involved in tunneling, it is very unlikely on scales larger than a femtometer, which is much smaller than even a single atom.  so, i will assume you mean electron tunneling, which is what most people talk about.)\n\nanyway, one problem that springs to mind is becoming more and more important in the semiconductor industry.  you may have heard of moore's law, which is an observation that over the lifetime of the integrated circuit industry, the "feature size" or structure size has been halved approximately every 18 months.  this means that transistors and wires shrink, and more and more components get squeezed together on a silicon chip.\n\ntunneling is a problem in this situation since it sets an ultimate limit on how small these features can get.  intel for example is ramping up to create processors with a 45-nanometer feature size by 2007.  these things certainly qualify as nanostructures.\n\nhowever, once you get under about 10nm or so, the wires and so on will be so closely spaced that electrons will tunnel from one to the other; this could turn a 0 into a 1, which would be a Bad Thing.  a way around this is to design circuits that are so-called "fault-tolerant" but this requires more hardware - which will only buy you a little bit of time, since more hardware offsets the smaller-hardware gain.  so this is a fundamental limit to standard circuits imposed by tunneling.\n\non the other hand, lots of nanostructures are currently being researched that take advantage of tunneling effects.  there is a whole sub-field of materials/physical science that can be called "single-electron electronics".  this is where one electron is used to represent a bit, rather than the thousands or millions used in normal electronics.\n\nthese electronics are typically made out of clusters of atoms called "quantum dots" and a few molecules.  at this size, tunneling effects are the primary source of the functionality of these devices!  people are working on single-electron transistors where an electron tunneling across a nanometer-sized barrier performs the "switching" that makes a transistor useful.  you could google the phrase "coulomb staircase" to see instances of this phenomenon.  \n\nthere is a lot of active research in this area - for example, here is the page of a guy in my department, who is working on using gold nanoparticles as the tunneling barrier between two long polymer "wires":  http://www.chem.utoronto.ca/staff/DHIRANI/research.htm\n\nhowever, at this point the state of the art is pretty primitive - certain building blocks like transistors and single logic gates have been made, but it's difficult to make them into larger functional circuits because they're so damned small.\n\nactually, now that i've written all this i see that you asked about the *creation* of nanostructures.  there are lots of different ways of creating nanostructured materials.  some involve self-assembly, where molecules arrange themselves into nanometer-sized structures because that structure is energetically favorable.  other ways include blasting away at some bulk material with a tightly focused beam (see focused-ion-beam (FIB) etchin
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1. 64 MB\n2. X86, 150 MHz\n3. http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/I/IRQ.html
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I would like to have a hypercube too, can you tell me how you made yours?
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http://books.google.com/books?q=Information+about+the+last+generation+of+computer%3F&ots=eRnTQQcyKD&sa=X&oi=print&ct=title
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Learn well the fundamentals of Computer Science.  Hardware may constantly change (Moore's Law) but the underlying theories will last forever.  Good luck.
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Here's an interesting page about early PC's. Keep scrolling down when the page opens.  It's rather interesting. \nhttp://www.blinkenlights.com/pc.shtml\n\nAnd, here's Wiki's entry:\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_computing_hardware
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quantum computer is any device for computation that makes direct use of distinctively quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. In a classical (or conventional) computer, the amount of data is measured by bits; in a quantum computer, it is measured by qubits. The basic principle of quantum computation is that the quantum properties of particles can be used to represent and structure data, and that quantum mechanisms can be devised and built to perform operations with this data.1\n\nThough quantum computing is still in its infancy, experiments have been carried out in which quantum computational operations were executed on a very small number of qubits. Research in both theoretical and practical areas continues at a frantic pace, and many national government and military funding agencies support quantum computing research, to develop quantum computers for both civilian and national security purposes, such as cryptanalysis. 2 (See Timeline of quantum computing for details on current and past progress.)\n\nIt is widely believed that if large-scale quantum computers can be built, they will be able to solve certain problems faster than any classical computer. Quantum computers are different from classical computers such as DNA computers and computers based on transistors, even though these may ultimately use some kind of quantum mechanical effect (for example covalent bonds). Some computing architectures such as optical computers may use classical superposition of electromagnetic waves, but without some specifically quantum mechanical resource such as entanglement, they do not share the potential for computational speed-up of quantum computers.
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It is time for a new computer.
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I would get a Pentium Duo Core (At least 1.8Ghz), about 1GB of RAM, 80GB Hard Drive (Preferably 7200RPM) DVD-R, and a 15.4 Truebrite Widescreen display.\n\nBut that's just me.
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ok well I don't know what you mean by this, but when determining the limitations of a computer look, and the amount of ram it has, the processor type and speed, and the size of hard drive it has.  Those are some key factors to determine how well a computer will perform.
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a molecule can act like a silicon chip, when electrons in the orbitals are spinning in their fixed directions. by placing electrons into certain spins, data can be stored like a binary code. thats what quantum computing hopes to achieve; building micro computers.
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A quantum computer is any device for computation that makes direct use of distinctively quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. In a classical (or conventional) computer, the amount of data is measured by bits; in a quantum computer, it is measured by qubits. The basic principle of quantum computation is that the quantum properties of particles can be used to represent and structure data, and that devised quantum mechanisms can be used to perform operations with this data. For a generally accessible overview of quantum computing, see Quantum Computing with Molecules, an article in Scientific American by Neil Gershenfeld and Isaac L. Chuang.\n\nhttp://www.answers.com/topic/quantum-computer?method=22
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Four things I'm waiting for, and hope to see in my lifetime:\n\nAn inexpensively-made material that is superconducting at "normal" temperatures.\n\nPractical fusion power. (Though that would probably follow naturally from the first one.)\n\nSome cheap way to break down any substance into its elemental components.  Everything would then be recyclable.\n\nCheap manufacturing of carbon nanomaterials such as hyperfilament, "Bucky tubes" and the like.\n\nIf you can get any of these ideas to work, you're welcome to steal them.\n\n-- Oh, and an anti-microwave; something that freezes as fast as a microwave cooks.