no, unfortunately I don't think he ever finished it. Though as he notes Zuse built complete relay computers in the early 1940s (using discarded telephone switching relays!). It's interesting that this development in computing has kind of been overlooked (I'd guess because it took place in 1940s Germany).
I came across his work again as I was putting together a relay based oscillator this weekend [1]. I wonder if I have enough relays to put together a half adder. :)
To qualify the "overlooked" part: In Germany, his work is part of basic computing history every Computer Scientist should have at University. So his general work is far from forgotten.
That's really great to hear. Aside from this web page I'd unfortunately never heard of his work before. If you have any references I'd be interested in reading them.
It's interesting that the wikipedia pages on the Manchester Baby, ENIAC, and Z3. All refer to them as "first computers" by one definition or another. I guess the ones you end up hearing about are to a degree culturally determined.
I assumed something similar might have been developed in Japan. And it seems they also developed a relay based computer in 1952 which I found interesting:
Well (according to Wiki, at least, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)#The_Z3_as_a_univ... ) the Z3 was only accidentally Turing-equivalent, and the hack for writing arbitrary programs on it was only discovered in 1998 (and wouldn't have been practically useful anyhow). The Manchester Baby was operational and ran its first program before the completion of the redesign and rebuild that made ENIAC Turing-equivalent. However, it had only been built as a technology demonstrator/testbed, and it was soon disassembled. (I say Turing-equivalent, but Turing's work wasn't the inspiration for any of these efforts to build a fully-programmable computer.)
There is at least the Konrad Zuse Internet Archive, even partly in english: http://zuse.zib.de/. I have no own references apart from lecture slides I have no access to anymore.
The thing with the first computer is similar with cars. France has a very different definition of what was the first car than germany - distinguishing between the first car and the first "modern" car - the same will probably be true for the USA and UK.
The tragedy is that Zuse tried to patent a lot of his inventions. His submissions were lost during the war, and when he resubmitted them after the war, his applications were struck down due to American and British prior art.
At least in the last 20 years or so, I think the Z3 is part of standard history-of-computing introductions in American CS curricula. We definitely learned about it when I was doing a CS degree in the early 2000s.
I came across his work again as I was putting together a relay based oscillator this weekend [1]. I wonder if I have enough relays to put together a half adder. :)
[1] http://41j.com/blog/2014/12/electromechanical-oscillator/