Konrad Zuse (1910-1995)
Some years prior to the Colossus in the U.K. and the ENIAC in the U.S., the Z3, constructed by Konrad Zuse in 1941, was crunching numbers in Germany.
Konrad Zuse was the architect of the first operating, fully electronic, program-controlled, general-purpose computer. He made the computer in Germany in 1941, only the machine was for the most part obscure until the 1960s.
Zuse was born in Berlin and learned engineering at the Berlin Technical School. Concerned with accelerating mathematical calculations, Zuse fashioned a device much like that produced by the nineteenth century English computer pioneer, Charles Babbage, whose work was unknown to him. After graduating in 1935, he began working for an aircraft company, passing his weekends building a computer (the Z1) in his parents' living-room. From the start, Zuse's design used binary numbers and he wrote his programs in logical form, employing "and", "or", and "not". Instructions were perforated on movie film. For memory, the Z1 employed slotted metal plates with pin positions in the slots constituting a one or zero.
Zuse's employer, the Henschel Aircraft Company in Berlin, Germany, furnished the resources for his Z3 model, which he finished in December 1941. It utilized 1,800 relays for memory, 600 for computing, and 200 for input-output. Established upon a binary floating-point number and switching system, it had all the properties of today's computers, such as a control block, a memory, and a calculator. Only it didn't have the capability to store the program in the memory collectively with the data as the memory was too small. It possessed a 64-word memory of 22 bits each and was capable of handling four additions per second and doing a multiplication in nearly five seconds. And it was quite big: five meters long, two meters high, and 80 centimeters wide.
Zuse was not able to convince the Nazi government to fund his work for a computer established on electronic valves. The Germans believed they were near to winning the War and found no need to endorse further research. The Z3 was destroyed in a 1945 air attack during World War II.
Zuse also invented a computer language, Plankalkul, that could be employed for both numerical and non-numerical problems, including programming chess games. In 1966 he became a professor at the University of Gottingen, Germany. Among his many honors is a medal from the American Federation of Information Processing Societies.
In addition to his technical work, Zuse established the first computer startup company in 1946. This company produced the Z4, which became the first commercial computer, leased to ETH Zürich in 1950. Due to the considerations of World War II, however, Zuse's work initially went largely overlooked in the UK and the US; perhaps his first authenticated influence on a US company was IBM's 1946 option on his patents. In the late 1960s, Zuse suggested the concept of a "Calculating Space" (a computation-based universe).
There is a full-scale reproduction of the Z3, as well as the Z4, in the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
Velocity Guide lets you compare Internet Providers, including cable, fiber, and DSL, plus we provide information on topics related to computers & the Internet.