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The theoretical groundwork

Konrad Zuse (pronounced [ˈkɔnʁat ˈtsuːzə] KON-rad TSUE-zuh. ; 22 June 1910 Berlin – 18 December 1995 Hünfeld near Fulda) was a German engineer and computer pioneer. His greatest achievement was the world's first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, the Z3, which became operational in May 1941. He received the Werner-von-Siemens-Ring in 1964 for the Z3.[1] Much of his early work was financed by his family and commerce, and he received little support from the Nazi-German Government.[2]

Zuse's S2 computing machine is considered to be the first process-controlled computer. In 1946 he designed the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül.[2] Zuse founded one of the earliest computer businesses on the 1st of April 1941 (Zuse Ingenieurbüro und Apparatebau).[3] This company built the Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer.

Due to World War II Zuse's work went largely unnoticed in the UK and the US. Possibly his first documented influence on a US company was IBM's option on his patents in 1946. In the late 1960s, Zuse suggested the concept of a Calculating Space (a computation-based universe).

There is a replica of the Z3, as well as the Z4, in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin in Berlin has an exhibition devoted to Zuse, displaying twelve of his machines, including a replica of the Z1, some original documents, including the specifications of Plankalkül, and several of Zuse's paintings.

==Pre-WWII work and the Z1, the "mechanical brain"[4]


Zuse Z1 replica in the German Museum of Technology in BerlinBorn in Berlin, Germany in 1910, the family moved to Braunsberg, East Prussia in 1912, where his father was a postal clerk. Zuse attended the Collegium Hosianum in Braunsberg. In 1923 the family moved to Hoyerswerda where he passed his Abitur in 1928.

He enrolled in the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg and explored both engineering and architecture, but found them to be boring. Zuse then pursued civil engineering graduating in 1935. For a time he worked for the Ford motor company, using his considerable artistic skills in the design of advertisements.[2] He started work as a design engineer at the Henschel aircraft factory in Berlin-Schönefeld. This required the performance of many routine calculations by hand, which he found mind-numbingly boring, leading him to dream of performing calculations by machine.

Working in his parents' apartment in 1936, his first attempt, called the Z1, was a floating point binary mechanical calculator with limited programmability, reading instructions from a perforated 35 mm film.[2] In 1937 Zuse submitted two patents that anticipated a von Neumann architecture. He finished the Z1 in 1938. The Z1 contained some 30,000 metal parts and never worked well, due to insufficient mechanical precision. The Z1 and its original blueprints were destroyed during WWII.

Between 1987 and 1989, Zuse recreated the Z1, suffering a heart-attack midway through the project. It cost 800,000 DM, and required four individuals (including Zuse) to assemble it. Funding for this retrocomputing project was provided by Siemens and a consortium of five companies.


The mathematical foundations of modern computer science began to be laid by Kurt Gödel with his incompleteness theorem (1931). In this theorem, he showed that there were limits to what could be proved and disproved within a formal system. This led to work by Gödel and others to define and describe these formal systems, including concepts such as mu-recursive functions and lambda-definable functions.

1936 was a key year for computer science. Alan Turing and Alonzo Church independently, and also together, introduced the formalization of an algorithm, with limits on what can be computed, and a "purely mechanical" model for computing.

These topics are covered by what is now called the Church–Turing thesis, a hypothesis about the nature of mechanical calculation devices, such as electronic computers. The thesis claims that any calculation that is possible can be performed by an algorithm running on a computer, provided that sufficient time and storage space are available.

Turing also included with the thesis a description of the Turing machine. A Turing machine has an infinitely long tape and a read/write head that can move along the tape, changing the values along the way. Clearly such a machine could never be built, but nonetheless, the model can simulate the computation of any algorithm which can be performed on a modern computer.

Turing is so important to computer science that his name is also featured on the Turing Award and the Turing test. He contributed greatly to British code-breaking successes in the Second World War, and continued to design computers and software through the 1940s, but committed suicide in 1954.

At a symposium on large-scale digital machinery in Cambridge, Turing said, "We are trying to build a machine to do all kinds of different things simply by programming rather than by the addition of extra apparatus".

In 1948, the first practical computer that could run stored programs, based on the Turing machine model, had been built - the Manchester Baby.

In 1950, Britain's National Physical Laboratory completed Pilot ACE, a small scale programmable computer, based on Turing's philosophy.