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Konrad Zuse
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Pre-WWII work and the Z1Born in Berlin, Germany, his parents moved to Braunsberg, East Prussia in 1912, where his father worked as a postal clerk. Zuse visited the Collegium Hosianum in Braunsberg and after his family moved to Hoyerswerda, he passed his Abitur in 1928.
Zuse graduated in civil engineering from the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1935. In his engineering studies, Zuse had to perform many routine calculations by hand, which he found mind-numbingly boring. This led him to dream about performing calculations by machine.
He started as a design engineer at the Henschel aircraft factory in Berlin-Schönefeld but resigned a year later to build a program driven/programmable machine.
Working in his parents' apartment in 1936, his first attempt, called the Z1, was a binary electrically driven mechanical calculator with limited programmability, reading instructions from a punched tape.
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1941 Konrad Zuse presented the Z3, the world's first working programmable, fully automatic computer in Berlin.
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Encyclopedia
Pre-WWII work and the Z1Born in Berlin, Germany, his parents moved to Braunsberg, East Prussia in 1912, where his father worked as a postal clerk. Zuse visited the Collegium Hosianum in Braunsberg and after his family moved to Hoyerswerda, he passed his Abitur in 1928.
Zuse graduated in civil engineering from the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1935. In his engineering studies, Zuse had to perform many routine calculations by hand, which he found mind-numbingly boring. This led him to dream about performing calculations by machine.
He started as a design engineer at the Henschel aircraft factory in Berlin-Schönefeld but resigned a year later to build a program driven/programmable machine.
Working in his parents' apartment in 1936, his first attempt, called the Z1, was a binary electrically driven mechanical calculator with limited programmability, reading instructions from a punched tape. The Z1 never worked well, though, due to the lack of sufficiently precise parts. The Z1 and its original blueprints were destroyed during World War II.
Between 1987 and 1989, Zuse recreated the Z1, suffering a heart-attack midway through the project. It had 30,000 components, 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 WWII years; the Z2, Z3, and Z4
World War II made it impossible for Zuse and other German computer scientists to work with scientists in the UK and the USA, or even to stay in contact with them. In 1939, Zuse was called for military service but was able to convince the army to let him return to 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 the Z1, from telephone relays. The same year, he started a company, Zuse Apparatebau (Zuse Apparatus Engineering), to manufacture his machines.
Improving on the basic Z2 machine, he built the Z3 in 1941. It was a binary 64-bit floating point calculator featuring programmability with loops but without conditional jumps, with memory and a calculation unit based on telephone relays. The telephone relays used in his machines were largely collected from discarded stock. Despite the absence of conditional jumps, the Z3 was a Turing complete computer (ignoring the fact that no physical computer can be truly Turing complete because of limited storage size). However, Turing-completeness was never considered by Zuse (who had practical applications in mind) and only demonstrated in 1998 (see History of computing hardware).
Zuse never received the support that computer pioneers in Allied countries, such as Alan Turing, got. The Z3 was financed only partly by the DVL (Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt, i.e. German Experimentation-Institution for Aviation), which wanted their extensive calculations automated. A request by his co-worker Helmut Schreyer for government funding for an electronic successor to the Z3 was denied as "strategically unimportant". In 1937 Schreyer had advised Zuse to use vacuum tubes as switching elements, who at this time considered it a crazy idea ("Schnapsidee" in his own words).
Zuse's company (with the Z3) was destroyed in 1945 by an Allied attack. Fortunately, the partially finished, relay-based Z4 had been moved to a safe place earlier. Zuse designed the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül, from 1941 to 1945, although he did not publish it in its entirety until 1972. No compiler or interpreter was available for Plankalkül until a team from the Free University of Berlin implemented it in 2000.
Konrad Zuse married Gisela Brandes in January 1945 - employing a carriage, himself dressed in tailcoat and top hat and with Gisela in wedding veil, for Zuse attached importance to a noble ceremony. Their son Horst was born in November 1945.
Zuse the entrepreneur
In 1946 Zuse founded the world's first computer startup company: the Zuse-Ingenieurbüro Hopferau. Venture capital was raised through ETH Zürich and an IBM option on Zuse's patents.
Zuse founded another company, Zuse KG, in 1949. The Z4 was finished and delivered to the ETH Zürich, Switzerland in September 1950. At that time, it was the only working computer in continental Europe, and the second computer in the world to be sold, only beaten by the BINAC. Other computers, all numbered with a leading Z, were built by Zuse and his company. Notable are the Z11, which was sold to the optics industry and to universities, and the Z22, the first computer with a memory based on magnetic storage.
By 1967, the Zuse KG had built a total of 251 computers. Due to financial problems, it was then sold to Siemens.
Calculating Space In 1967 Zuse also suggested that the universe itself is running on a grid of computers; in 1969 he published the book Rechnender Raum (translated into English as Calculating Space). This idea has attracted a lot of attention, since there is no physical evidence against Zuse's thesis. Edward Fredkin (1980s), Juergen Schmidhuber (1990s), Stephen Wolfram (A New Kind of Science) and others have expanded on it.
Zuse received several awards for his work. After he retired, he focused on his hobby, painting. Zuse died on December 18 1995 in Hünfeld, Germany, near Fulda.
Awards
Quotations- "The belief in a certain idea gives to the researcher the support for his work. Without this belief he would be lost in a sea of doubts and insufficiently verified proofs."
- "The rattling of the Z4 is the only interesting thing about the Zürich nightlife ."
External links- – By Prof. Horst Zuse (K. Zuse's son); an extensive and well-written historical account
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- Computermuseum Kiel
- Computermuseum Kiel
- Computermuseum Kiel
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