Microsoft's Nadella Wants to Help Coders Take a Quantum Leap

Forty-two years ago this summer a two-person company called Micro-Soft shipped its first product. It was a version of the programming language BASIC for the Altair 8800, one of the first successful personal computers. The company is now much larger, and un-hyphenated. Practical quantum computers don't yet exist, and Microsoft is behind rival tech giants Google and IBM in the race to develop quantum hardware. But at a conference in Orlando Monday for its corporate customers, the company announced the release of a new programming language for quantum computers.