Konrad Zuse

Konrad Zuse (June 22, 1910 - December 18, 1995) was a German engineer and computer pioneer. His greatest achievement was the completion of the first functional tape-stored-program-controlled computer, the Z3, in 1941.

The WWII years; the Z2, Z3, and Z4

World War II made it impossible and undesirable for Zuse and contemporary German computer scientists to work with similar scientists in the UK and the USA, or even to stay in contact. In 1939, Zuse was called for military service but was able to convince the army to let him return to building his computers. In 1940, he gained support from the Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt (AVA, Aerodynamic Research Institute), which used his work for the production of glide bombs. Zuse built the Z2, a revised version of his machine, from telephone relays. The same year, he started a company, Zuse Apparatebau (Zuse Apparatus Engineering), to manufacture his programmable machines.

Related Topics:
1939 - 1940 - Glide bomb - Z2 - Relay

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Satisfied with the function of the basic Z2 machine, he built the Z3 and completed it in 1941. It was a binary calculator featuring programmability with loops but without conditional jumps, with memory and a calculation unit based on telephone relays. Despite the absence of conditional jumps as convenient instructions, the Z3 was a Turing complete computer (ignoring the fact that no physical computer can be truly Turing complete due to limited storage size). However, its Turing-completeness was never envisioned by Zuse (who had practical applications in mind) and only proven in 1998 (see History of computing hardware).

Related Topics:
Z3 - 1941 - Binary - Turing complete - 1998 - History of computing hardware

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Zuse never received the official support that computer pioneers in Allied countries, such as Alan Turing, managed to get. The telephone relays used in his machines were largely collected from discarded stock.

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Zuse's company, together with the Z3, was destroyed in 1945 by an Allied attack. The partially finished, relay-based Z4 had been brought to a safe place earlier. Zuse designed a high-level programming language, the Plankalkül, allegedly from 1941 to 1945, although he did not publish it until 1972. No compiler or interpreter was available for Plankalkül until a team from the Free University of Berlin implemented it in 2000, five years after Zuse died.

Related Topics:
1945 - Z4 - 1941 - 1972 - Free University of Berlin - 2000

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