One clue is here: "Previously, scientists at NIST and elsewhere have been unable to coax any qubit technology into performing a complete set of quantum logic o

One clue is here: "Previously, scientists at NIST and elsewhere have been unable to coax any qubit technology into performing a complete set of quantum logic operations while transporting information without disturbances degrading the later processes." Definition of a qubit: "A quantum bit or qubit (pronounced /ˈkjuːbɪt/) is a unit of quantum information." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit) It seems that the problem was getting the initialised qubits to do anything at all. However, it seems that they now have a process to create a barebones processing unit and stack (if I understand the following correctly) "As a result, the NIST researchers have now demonstrated on a small scale all the generally recognized requirements for a large-scale ion-based quantum processor. Previously they could perform all of the following processes a few at a time, but now they can perform all of them together and repeatedly: (1) “initialize” qubits to the desired starting state (0 or 1), (2) store qubit data in ions, (3) perform logic operations on one or two qubits, (4) transfer information between different locations in the processor, and (5) read out qubit results individually (0 or 1)."