Good to see Zuse on HN. It's possible to go and see his machines in Germany and I highly recommend it. This is a "forgotten" part of computing history because of WWII and deserves the light of day.
I can highly recommend a visit there. Not only you can see an original Z4 and a replica of the Z3, but also lot's of more science and history related exhibitions. Don't miss the Enigma!
Z22 is at ZKM in Karlsruhe, but Deutsches Museum has a whole department on Z3 and related machines. I can highly recommend it to anyone interested in (very) early computers!
The article makes it sound like he waterboarded him, but that's probably just because the word 'interrogate' has become so unpredictably uncivilized in recent usage.
It seems like there was probably a degree of duress and that this was a continuation of a series of "interrogations" where perhaps a greater deal of duress was necessary? Not that the German scientists were necessarily unwilling but that they were anyway required to attend:
>"As the behaviour towards German scientists had already improved considerably in 1947,the interrogation had the more elegant form of a small colloquium. A handful of German specialists from Göttingen had been invited among them also myself. The significant German people who there gave talks were Professor Alwin Walther who had been thoroughly concerned with Hollerith machines and differential analyzers at the Darmstadt Institute of Technology, and Konrad Zuse with his relay calculators. If in addition Professor Friedrich Willers from Dresden had also participated, all leading German scientists who have been busy during the war in the development of sequence controlled calculating machines would have been there. Though Willers was in the Soviet occupation zone and therefore probably not available for the Britons." (http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/Images/Turing_Zus...) //
Note that Porter from the NPL later mentions performing an "investigation" as part of a military operation, in his military uniform (despite there being no requirement to do so). Also:
>"Undoubtedly, the participation at the colloquium of Göttingen was not optional. (ibid, p.5)"
tl;dr - It sounds like there's evidence to suggest Turing had an unreported meeting with Zuse in 1948. There is also a suspicion that Turing could have met with Zuse in 1934 on a trip to Gottingen.
The bit about wearing a military uniform seems strange.
My grandfather was part of a similar investigation of the German electronics industry, he had done his PhD at Aachen in the early 30s and found that he already knew all the senior people, I can't imagine him wearing a uniform.
One funny detail I read about those machines is that he had to steal (due to war shortages) copper cables from public telephone lines, which could have lead to death penalty (because of sabotage).
Zuse is an interesting example of history being written by the victors. Ask any German who invented the computer and they'll tell you it was Konrad Zuse, but he is almost completely unknown elsewhere.
Turing did brilliant work, but Zuse did the job of Turing and Tommy Flowers, working in isolation with very limited resources.
Excellent catch! I love Wikipedia with all their faults but probably we need not so difficult to build tools to recognize anomalies between Wikipedia cultures... sorry, languages.
English and German sources are more likely to be accessible to people working in English and German, respectively, and less in the reverse. And Wikepedia is all about sources. So not surprising, but worth fixing.
You know, this first springed to my mind. As a kid, I had an old teacher whose father was an official in one of the nazi-backed regimes. There we were, talking about computer history and he was very upset (like really agitated) about this, saying to me that Zuse (Z3, basically) was the first digital computer / inventor. He said it was the case of history being written by the victors. I semi-believed him, considering his personal history, but was something I would hear quite often later in Germany as well.
I never realized that Zuse is unknown in the US. I am Austrian and I am pretty sure I have learned about Zuse in school.
I assume the situation in Germany is similar.
Now I am curious what people from other countries were taught.
Did you learn anything about Zuse?
As a German, I'm pretty sure most Germans have no idea who invented the computer or think it was someone in America.
My parents, and I think the same goes for many others, heard the name of this guy for the first time today, when newspapers and radio programs brought short articles about him.
One reason may be that, at least when I was in school, in computer science classes, no history about that field was taught at all.
It's a bit sad how many misconceptions about .. just about everything. I wish people would like to unfold origins, history with precision. Not sure if they don't care, prefer to be fed a nice story, or just don't have the time.
> "Zuse is an interesting example of history being written by the victors."
This may hold true for the Zuse story, but he's also an example for german history about german scientists. While the Wikipedia article (both german and english) mentioning his ties to the NS and the german defence industry of that time, you probably find no hint about that at universities where lecture halls are named after him. For example in Hamburg, where the only "real" lecture hall at the CS department is named after him. In the small exhibition about his scientific life beneath this lecture hall you don't find a word about that (at least the last time I was there).
Zuse is known to everyone who's taken even a fairly superficial look at the history of the development of computing machines. It's also inaccurate to compare his work to Turing's, Zuse's focus was practical. He certainly did not independently develop Turing's theoretical work, nor did he really need to for his purposes.
So, Zuse's development were indeed important, but the Zuse Z3 had in important limitation that the article doesn't mention, which leads some people to not count it as "first": The Z3 was largely not Turing complete.
This is because the Z3 had no conditional branching. In 1998 it was shown that the Z3 actually didn't need conditional branching, and it was Turing complete but only because it is possible to unroll conditional statements into a version where both branches are evaluated and then the result of one is cancelled. However, at the time of the Z3's development and use, this wasn't known.
So while the Z3 is indeed an important early computer, it shares a significant discontinuity with modern computing that reflects the time. The Z3 was not intended as a "computer" in the modern sense, it was more of a calculating machine that could perform repeat arithmetic more quickly. It was never intended for the more complex roles we use computers in today.
A lot of people don't count the Z3 as the first programmable digital computer because of this limitation. If you disqualify it for that reason, the title probably goes to the British Colossus the next year.
Obviously Zuse did develop conditional branching (such as in his language Plankalkül), but that was years later and by then it had already been done by others. To Zuse's credit, he probably would have gotten to it much faster had he not had a real problem with allied bombing destroying his work.
A major takeaway from this is that assigning titles like "first" and "inventor of computing" is quite silly. Computer science developed very, very quickly, with many of it key developments made by multiple people in parallel. We are largely familiar with what happened in the West for sociopolitical reasons, but similar work was done in Germany and the Soviet Union, often successfully. However, calling Zuse the inventor of computer science is as uncharitable to Turing as the reverse is to Zuse, both had their successes and failures.
When I give talks on computer history, I often like to say things like "Steve Jobs, inventor of the Computer" to elicit a laugh. The unfortunate thing is that sometimes people don't realize that it's a joke.
Minor trivia - one of the TRON: Legacy writers confirmed to me on Twitter that the character "Zuse" was indeed named in honor of the gentleman in question.
"And, thanks to Konrad Zuse, computers and computer networks are what we have."
Holy smokes, what an inaccurate statement. Arguably one of the obstacles to progress in technology is due the persistence of the fundamental computer design that has been employed since "Baby" ran its first program just before lunch on June 21, 1948, including an approach to fast random memory accesses. This approach was novel, based on CRTs used in radar. Most everything else -- design-wise -- was from the Moore School Lectures of 1946. And the really inspirational part of those was from the work on the ENIAC.
The missing piece that needs to be more generally appreciated is how the early work on practical, general-purpose computers was quietly done in England while the Americans were squabbling over who was first.
There is a very important piece of history left out of this article and comments. The Nazis hired IBM to do the bulk of their computing. They may have used the Z3, but my uderstanding is that they didn't use it, though since it had such a narrowly specified field of use they could have used it and IBM wouldn't have known the difference. But the fact is that IBM supplied, at the very least, the vast majority of computer tech for the Nazis.
I'd be very interested in a detailed comparison between whatever IBM was using at the time, the capabilities of the Z3, and whether it could have been modified to do the types of work IBM did. IBM's primary notoriety about all this is that they helped the Nazis to locate members of groups to be exterminated, but I expect that was a small part of what they did for the Nazis. But no IBM execs faced the Nuremburg Tribunals.
Also, I think Zuse at least somewhat well known in the U.S. The most basic computer books I have seen all have something about him. The information is available and common in the U.S. in elementary computer books like they use to teach schoolkids what computers are. I've read a fair amount of stuff about him in elementary school computer texts that I got in thrift stores and like that. The basic information about who he was and what he did is commonly available. Details are less common, so when I saw the post I immediately checked it out, whereas I more commonly open up pages in new tabs and read them after I've done my shopping through the feed. But the reason I recognized the name of the man and the machine is because of elementary school books that I picked up in a thrift store in 99.
I was under the impression that once the war broke out, IBM in Germany was cut off from the rest of the company, and the support provided to the German government that was so controversial was from the severed German appendage of IBM rather than something that IBM proper directed or profited from (sort of like how Coca-Cola's facilities in Germany turned into Fanta, which ironically made its way back to America after the war).
Is this not true? That's not to say that non-German former IBM employees who offered assistance in Nazi Germany shouldn't be considered Nazi collaborators, but I never thought of their actions as reflecting on IBM as a whole or IBM's leadership at the time.
Of course IBM made a decision to do business with the Nazi government prior to the war, but public perceptions of the Nazis in America were very different in the '30s, partially because the Nazis weren't nearly as well-understood then as now. Hitler was Life Magazine's Man of the Year in 1938, and prominent Americans like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford were known to be admirers.
None of this is to excuse anyone's delusions about Hitler or the Nazis, or to excuse those who helped them. I just never thought it was 100% appropriate to tar IBM with that particular brush. Or am I missing vital information (very possible)?
The missing vital information is this:
IBM Berlin would not have been cut off until the U.S. entered the war. The war broke out years before, and the human rights abuses began years before that. IBM absolutely knew what was up for years by the time the U.S. manipulated Hitler into declaring war on us after Pearl Harbor (That's a whole story in itself involving a Nazi spy who was serving in the U.S. Congress). They were worse than Nazi collaborators; they didn't have to worry about being shot if they didn't do what they were told. The news reports about the holocaust were largely discounted; even Jews didn't believe them, but IBM had access to inside information and would have known why Hitler was so obsessed with census data. They had to know that the news reports were true.
Not to say that the plight of the various groups the final solution was applied to would have been significantly different if IBM hadn't been involved.
The history of computing is filled with so many names, and odd or tangled stories, this is one that I was un-aware of, and is super interesting.
If you like these strange connections you should go and read about the Jacquard loom, that was using punch cards to control the patterns produced! It can be argued that "programmability" came before general purpose computing...
> Zuse completed his work entirely independently of other leading computer scientists and mathematicians of his day. Between 1936 and 1945, he was in near-total intellectual isolation.
"Invented the computer" is a strong assertion. I rather like Walter Isaacson's history on "The Innovators", where he talks about the parallel creations of Zuse and other inventors, to show that things are not as black-and-white; that the "inventor of the computer" depends on a murky definition of what a "computer" is, and what the final act of creating it is.
It's more likely that we should attribute the invention of the computer to a collective group of individuals; some that advanced the notion of what a computer should work a little bit, some that advanced a lot, and some that had good ideas that didn't go anywhere at the time.
Going from "some mechanical devices" to "a fully electric computer with a higher level programming language and full turing capabilities" is quite a leap. That’s the pretty much what "inventing" something means.
Technically the first computers were (mainly) females who were good at maths and were put forward to compute maths tables for the navy. In fact the reason that we call (modern) computers by that name is because they are named after the original humans who did the job. In fact Babbage worked on the calculation engine(s) precisely to aid in the automated calculations that they would be providing, including identifying several corrections in log tables that were printed around that time.
The first electromechanical computers were arguably the Lorenz machine (reconstruction at TNMOC next to Bletchley Park) and the Bombe (a reconstruction of which is available at Bletchley park). The first electrical only computer was ENIAC, though you tend not to hear about these from American historians as some of these facts were classified until (relatively) recently.
I'm not saying though, that this is a criteria for calling any machine a computer. But it's probably what sets Zuse's achievement apart.
UPDATE: I've just learned that Babbage's language was also Turing complete. So Zuse's achievement is solely having physically built the first working computer, while Babbage's machine was never realized.
Babbage invented the concept of the programmable computer, Zuse built a programmable electronic computer, which could later be shown to be turing-complete. Those things are pretty subtle, and the 'national' version is always the least subtle, I guess ;)
Leonardo da Vinci also invented tanks and helicopters, and then it took a couple of hundred years to build some.
"Absolutely would have worked" is probably the closest you can get to modern software development ;)
Or more seriously put: It's a concept for a machine with 55k moving parts and powered by a steam engine. "Would work" is probably a bold statement considering how far off theoretical designs always are from the engineering reality, by all experience.
"We have been pecking away at Babbage’s original design drawings for some while now and have found with regret that we are unable to reverse engineer a coherent and consistent understanding of the Analytical Engine from the mechanical drawings alone. "
- Plankalkuel, by some criteria the first high-level programming language [1].
- Digital physics [2]. I have no idea if this is taken seriously by physicists.
- First chess program, predating Wiener, Shannon and Turing [3].
- First implementation of floating point numbers [4].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalkül
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_Space
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess#Chronology
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#History