
Germany's unheralded computer inventor - edw519
http://blogs.sites.post-gazette.com/index.php/news/techman/33515-techmangermanys-unheralded-computer
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_delirium
I'm not sure I'd call him "unheralded". When I saw that description, I
thought, "huh, there's someone other than Zuse I should know about?", but then
the article _was_ about Zuse.

I mean sure, he's not Turing- or Von-Neumann-level famous, but in both those
cases their fame largely stems from their involvement in a number of other
things as well (Turing's early AI writing and theoretical models of computing,
and Von Neumann's role in the Manhattan Project and game theory). Zuse is
pretty famous in comparison to the other computer-builders of the era, e.g.
John Mauchly or John Vincent Atanasoff.

~~~
ugh
He is also pretty well known in Germany. That (I guess you could call it local
fame) seems about appropriate for what he did. He is no Turing, after all.

The new computer science and automation building of my university in Germany
(now the second largest building on the campus) was named after Zuse. I would
say that’s quite the honor and recognition, especially considering the other
buildings are named after Humboldt, Newton (mechanical engineering), Kirchhoff
(electrical engineering), Helmholtz, Leibniz (library), Röntgen, Curie and
Faraday.

~~~
billforsternz
A nice permanent exhibit in the engineering and technology museum in Berlin
testifies to him being well known in Germany.

~~~
jeza
This was just a small part of that exhibit that I photographed in the
Deutsches Technikmuseum:
<http://www.flickr.com/photos/87883903@N00/4279979012/>

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guard-of-terra
There's also a Soviet unheralded hero:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Alexeyevich_Lebedev>

He acted a bit later, but the same pattern: making his first computer in an
estate using commodity hardware, then producing a quite few interesting
machines some of which were the best in continental Europe at the time.

Sadly, it seems that all european computers are essentially evolutionary dead
ends - so nobody remembers them and their creators.

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derda
The article is kind of incomplete and concentrating more on the circumstances
(nazis, war, ..) then his actual inventions.

\- He invented the first turing complete computer the Z3 which was finished in
1941, the Z4 (which was based on the Z3 was the first commercial computer)

\- He is also responsible for the first high level computing language -
Planalkül

The wikipedia article on him has some better information:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse>

~~~
Retric
One of the more fascinating things about the history of computing is vacuum
tubes where first commercially available in 1920 and several computing devices
where so quickly built from them. When you look at how unstable early vacuum
tubes actually where the gap where a computer was possible and when the first
one was built was fairly small.

~~~
mjwalshe
they are quite reliable if you don't turn them off which is what colossus did

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acqq
Absolutely the best material on Konrad Zuse's inventions can be found in
archive.org captures. It's written by his son Prof. Horst Zuse:

[http://web.archive.org/web/20040213064006/http://www.epemag....](http://web.archive.org/web/20040213064006/http://www.epemag.com/zuse/)

~~~
sb
Hi,

thanks so much for linking this. I have always been a fan of the history of
computing (e.g., Moshe Vardi mentioned Charles Peirce in a talk once
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce>, and I have seen a
reconstruction of one of Leibniz' calculators
[[http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Leibnitzrech...](http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Leibnitzrechenmaschine.jpg&filetimestamp=20060706122903\])),
but I did _not_ know that Konrad Zuse got a patent on the concept of
pipelining in 1949. (AFAIR Hennesy and Pattern's "Computer Architecture: A
Quantitative Approach" cites Tomasulo's algorithm from 1967)

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NonEUCitizen
When Merkel gave a speech at Stanford mentioning Zuse invented the computer,
she got laughed at.

[http://www.marketwatch.com/story/reporters-notebook-
merkel-o...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/reporters-notebook-merkel-on-
german-engineering-2010-04-16)

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beloch
When I was in undergrad my university offered an unusual course: "The History
of Computing". The prof wrote the text for the course, but it was actually a
pretty good book, unlike many prof written texts.

[http://www.amazon.com/History-Computing-Technology-2nd-
Editi...](http://www.amazon.com/History-Computing-Technology-2nd-
Edition/dp/0818677392/ref=sr_1_10?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1332105922&sr=1-10)

Zuse was given his due in this book (and the course).

A recommended read if you're interested in the foundations of computing. It's
oriented much more towards early computation devices than the PC era. If you
want the story of Jobs, look elsewhere.

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cygx
See also <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl> and
[http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Programme/Plankalkuel/Plankalk...](http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Programme/Plankalkuel/Plankalkuel-
Report/Plankalkuel-Report.htm) for information on Plankalkül, an imperative
programming language by Zuse, which, however, never was implemented on his
computers.

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ChuckMcM
Konrad really is an unsung hero. Had he been able to publish his work and
interact with others in the field I don't doubt we would all know his name.

~~~
excuse-me
Although paradoxically, if circumstances had been such that he could - there
wouldn't have been as much demand to invent computers !

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phreeza
He is also sometimes credited with writing the first chess programm, in his
own language, Plankalkül. cf
[http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Programme/Plankalkuel/Chess/ch...](http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Programme/Plankalkuel/Chess/chess.htm)

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rmoriz
If you plan to write a blog post about other German computer/electronics
pioneers, why not pick Heinz Nixdorf:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Nixdorf>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixdorf_Computer_AG>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqGZBUs7wP4>

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thenextcorner
I once made pictures in the Computer museum in Berlin of the Zuse first
computers. [http://thenextcorner.com/2008/01/zuse-computer-
tentoonstelli...](http://thenextcorner.com/2008/01/zuse-computer-
tentoonstelling/) Sorry, site is in Dutch!

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NonEUCitizen
The Computer History Museum (Shoreline exit on Hwy 101) has one of his boards.
It used electro-mechanical relays instead of vacuum tubes.

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lwat
I've always wanted to build a replica of the Z1

[http://www.pcgameshardware.com/screenshots/original/2008/12/...](http://www.pcgameshardware.com/screenshots/original/2008/12/zusez1.jpg)

It was a mechanical, binary computer. It ran at 1 Hz, had 1400 bits of memory,
and it could add, subtract, multiply and divide. It even had a control unit
which means it could run real computer programs. A 22 bit floating point
multiply took 10 clock cycles.

And all of that in a completely mechanical system!

