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.
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.
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.
> "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 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.
[+] [-] mafribe|9 years ago|reply
- 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
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|9 years ago|reply
>The original notation was two dimensional. (!)
[+] [-] pieter1976|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mh-cx|9 years ago|reply
http://www.deutsches-museum.de/en/exhibitions/communication/...
Here's the Z3 in action (German only, try subtitles):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUXnhVrT4CI
[+] [-] jgrahamc|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elcapitan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdietrich|9 years ago|reply
Turing did brilliant work, but Zuse did the job of Turing and Tommy Flowers, working in isolation with very limited resources.
[+] [-] cmarschner|9 years ago|reply
Similarly, the German version of "Computer" mentions Zuse 20 times [3]; the English version starts describing the Z2 [4].
Quite fascinating how Wikipedia is written through the local lense.
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatik#Entwicklung_moderne...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science
[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer#Electromechanical
[+] [-] Keyframe|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Arnsaste|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grimoald|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schlowmo|9 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] pvg|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jcrawfordor|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] porsupah|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ericssmith|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] genedickson|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] mwfunk|9 years ago|reply
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)?
[+] [-] marktangotango|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zer00eyz|9 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] eternalban|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiatia|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mh-cx|9 years ago|reply
Most remarkable:
> 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.
[+] [-] kuschku|9 years ago|reply
He also developed a very awesome high-level language very early on.
[+] [-] jsnider3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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