A brief prehistory of qubits

Wernher von Braun is supposed to have said, "Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." The path to a new idea is seldom straight, and travelers seldom know what their actual destination will be. I intend to illustrate all this by describing the origin of the word "qubit" and the concept of quantum data compression in the early days of quantum information theory. The story will have some elements familiar to explorers: setting out, wandering around, getting lost, finding clues, getting stuck, giving up, changing course, reaching goals -- and finding oneself in a huge new territory that even now, thirty years on, is not fully understood.