The ideas behind Quantum Information Processing (QIP) began to appear about twenty years ago and theoretical developments have been appearing ever since. Over the last decade quantum experiments have begun to realize QIP and point the way towards the routes for future quantum information technology. This review is a simple introduction to QIP for non-experts. It discusses the basic ideas of and the underpinning quantum theory needed to understand them, as well as various applications and algorithms, and some of the main candidate routes for realizing QIP.