This is a timeline of quantum computing and communication.

Stephen Wiesner invents conjugate coding.

13 June – James L. Park (Washington State University, Pullman)'s paper is received by Foundations of Physics, in which he describes the non possibility of disturbance in a quantum transition state in the context of a disproof of quantum jumps in the concept of the atom described by Bohr.

At the first Conference on the Physics of Computation, held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in May, Paul Benioff and Richard Feynman give talks on quantum computing. Benioff's talk 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 the evolution of a quantum nature system on a classical computer, and he proposed a basic model for a quantum computer. Feynman's conjecture on a quantum simulating computer, published 1982, understood as – the reality of quantum mechanics expressed as an effective quantum system necessitates quantum computers, is conventionally accepted as a beginning of quantum computing.

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

Artur Ekert at the University of Oxford, proposes entanglement-based secure communication.

Daniel R. Simon, at Université de Montréal, Quebec, Canada, invents an oracle problem, Simon's problem, for which a quantum computer would be exponentially faster than a conventional computer. This algorithm introduces the main ideas which were then developed in Peter Shor's factorization algorithm.

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