This is a solid question and it's worth an answer. There's kind of four things I want to get to: 1. the hardware is highly varied; 2. there are some fundamental operations which any hardware is going to have to be a quantum computer; 3. the actual "programs" consist of some precisely timed electrical signals turning on or off some of those fundamental operations in order, followed by (and occasionally interleaved with) these destructive "blasts" which actually tell you what's going on inside; 4. it helps to maybe revisit 2 and 1 once you know that with some specific examples.

1. You know how there's a lot of different hardware implementations for computers? There's Babbage engines, there's the silicon that we use every day, once upon a time there were vacuum tubes and such... we get a lot of freedom because the definition of computation, e.g. the definition of a Turing machine, just involves a sort of abstract manipulation of symbols but does not say anything about how those symbols are embodied in reality. The same bits that are high/low voltages in your CPU or copper cable can be flashes of light in a fiber-optic cable or aligned spin-domains in your spinning hard-drive or whether current can flow through a channel in your flash SSD. The oldest trick in the book is to represent one set of "logical" bits as a different pattern of "physical bits" (which then get represented their own way downstream) in order to correct errors or transmit heavily biased signals without net voltage bias or whatever.

Same with quantum computers. We don't know which hardware is going to scale so we've got spin qubits and superconducting flux qubits and cavities with super-high-quality mirrors pointing inward which trap photons, and all sorts of other qubits. But you can think of these as small little isolation chambers which must be shielded from each other and the rest of the world, maybe microscopic, perhaps all in a row. We have many candidates for what goes in the box and how the following operations are done.

There are some possibilities for alternative designs for "quantum computers" that are not the conventional quantum computer design, for example D-Wave is trying to do the quantum annealing thing, have lots of these things all connected. But researchers like the following approach because it is very concrete and has separable concerns which can be separately addressed.

2. There are some fundamental operations which these little rooms need to be able to do.

First off, we have the entanglement operations. These need to be able to shove these rooms together so that they affect each other. When shoved together, what matters is a set of 4 energy levels, E00, E01, E10, E11, of how much interaction energy there would be if both bits were forced to 0, if one bit was forced to 0 and the other was forced to 1, etc -- and the absolute value of these energies (not just their differences) also matters relative to the baseline energy B that all the other qubits experience while this happens.

The shoving operation is actually allowed to be pretty much anything that generates a "nontrivial" set of E00, E01, E10, E11, because it's the hardest thing to get right and yet only one little property of it ("quantum entanglement") is really needed.

The next operations are the room-phasing operations. These apply to any room by itself, and come in two forms: you can either raise the energy of the room relative to all of the other rooms (which only affects things if this room is entangled with the other rooms), or you might create an energy difference between the 0 state and the 1 state, or so. It turns out that you can think of all of these as a rotation of a sphere[1], so a very common model is to have "pulses" of light or magnetism or whatever in two different physical directions, with very precise control over how long that pulse lasts, to give full ability to twist these spheres that way.

The final operation is the readout operation, which requires "blasting" the qubit somehow into some really big system which can report and process the measurement. The nice thing about blasts that there is a nice chunk of theory which says that readouts don't actually have to happen before any particular time, though you might need them to happen after some entanglement step or so. There are quantum versions of all of the logical gates which can be implemented on this thing if it is too hard to blast away the room to get a bit of classical information, and then connect that to all of these lasers or whatever that are manipulating this system from these different directions.

The "blasts" are certainly different from the "pulses", the "pulses" need to basically have no real input or output, they just need to change the local environment a little bit. The "blasts" need to hit the specific device slightly harder in some way. The technical difference is that examining the outcome of a pulse you should not have any idea whether the qubit is more 0 or more 1 or anything else about it; after the blast, you should have total knowledge about whether the qubit is 0 or 1. So usually these two need to exploit some sort of very different physics.

3. So, how the computers are actually used is, we get four or more of these boxes together and try to figure out a routine to start out the first four rooms in the |0000> state, move it to the |1111> state representing the number 15, and then we try to figure out whether we can run the quantum factoring algorithm to find out that fifteen is three times five. So there is some fussing around with the thing as it's brought to ultra-cold temperatures, then there are some time-controlled pulses from which do these bit rotations, some lower-finesse entanglement steps where the particles are somehow connected for some set times, then there is maybe some other schedule of more pulses... and then finally your readout lasers blast the thing, and get 4 bits out of it, and we write down what binary number we saw. We repeat a lot and we find out, woah, 40% of the time this was 3, and 40% of the time this was 5, and 20% of the time it was something else. We then daydream of the day when this 20% becomes low enough that we can run a quantum error-correcting-code on top of this thing so that we can use three times as many qubits but the error will drop rather than increase.

4. Just to get some ideas of what the hardware might look like inside this room, let me give two examples.

In flux qubits, which are maybe coming up on 20 years old or so, there is a little superconducting loop which holds the qubit as a superposition of currents going clockwise and counterclockwise around it, the single-qubit pulses are accomplished by firing microwaves at the thing, while the actual readout is done by another superconducting loop that is in close proximity called a SQUID, this thing is sensitive to electromagnetic induction, which. You measure your ability to fire a bunch of electrons through the SQUID in order to figure out whether the current in the flux qubit is going clockwise or counterclockwise. By contrast this "bringing the rooms together" operation really needs to bring these two micrometer-sized devices into inductive contact so that they start influencing each other. And of course nothing is superconducting at room temperature so this all is happening in some big refrigerator.

Another promising thing in recent years has been the "NV qubits," which consist of a nitrogen atom sitting in one of the carbon locations of a diamond's crystal lattice, a "defect" in the otherwise perfect lattice. These can be made to 'fluoresce' or flash, so you can just see where they are and then deposit some structures on top of wherever they turned out, and the key is that you get a nice spin state in the qubit which has a nicely long lifetime even at room temperature, so you don't need the elaborate cooling setup that you need for superconductors -- and it interacts nicely with microwave pulses to do the single-qubit manipulation. There are some tricky problems with readout just because diamond has a very high index of refraction, which means light moves very slowly in it and gets bent a lot, but the bigger problems occur with trying to get these things to interact with each other since you basically just have this diamond lattice and it has some nitrogens in it and you can't really move them relative to each other or insert some sort of spin-wires into the lattice that will connect the two spins or anything like that. So it's missing this most-important property of the entangling operation. My guess is that if one of these looked like a computer it would have to have these little diamond qubits doing this process via some elaborate setup existing above the chip, some constant source of short-lived microwave photons which could be entangled with these qubits and then with each other, then immediately measured and the measurement used to tweak the NV qubits, leaving only the residual entanglement between the NV qubits. But you would see the same pattern of a computer program as some timing of pulses that are fired at these systems, combined with some timing of these entanglements-by-photons or so.

[1] https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/204090/understan...