Today it’s widely acknowledged that the future of computing will involve the quantum realm. Companies like Google, Microsoft, IBM, and a few well-funded startups are frantically building quantum computers and routinely claiming advances that seem to bring this exotic, world-changing technology within reach. In 1979 all of this was unthinkable. But that summer, two scientists met in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Puerto Rico, and their aquatic conversation led to a body of work that created quantum information theory. In a larger sense, their contributions helped bring computer science into the quantum age. Those water-logged scientists, Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard, are now the latest recipients of the ACM A.M. Turing Award, the Nobel Prize of the field. Until that 1979 meeting, there had been a disconnect between information science and physics. The latter field had experienced a disruption in the early 20th century when physicists discovered quantum mechanics, a deeper explanation of how the universe operated that superseded the classical physics of Issac Newton. Computer science, however, didn’t account for the quantum …