Z3 Completed This Day In 1941 |
Written by Sue Gee | |||
Monday, 12 May 2025 | |||
On May 12, 1941 Konrad Zuse completed his Z3 computer, the first program-controlled electromechanical digital computer. It followed in the footsteps of the Z1 - the world’s first binary digital computer which Zuse had developed in 1938 and its successor the Z2 the first relay-driven computer. You may well never have heard of German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse, but he has a better claim than most to be the man who invented the programmable computer in the sense of actually building one. In fact, he built several and the third model, the Z3, can lay claim to being the world's first programmable computer. At the time of the Z3 an important new influence entered the scene - King Kong. Yes, the hairy giant ape that climbed the Empire State building and was shot down by biplanes! King Kong - an affect on computing history? Zuse was a fan of the film and so were many of his friends, enough to form a fan club. They decided to produce a stage version of the film and Zuse, who was tall, hoped for the part of Kong - but in the end the honor fell to an even larger man - Helmut Schreyer. The play ran for weeks in a Berlin theatre. Night after night Schreyer would lurch about the stage smashing papier mache skyscrapers and being shot by toy planes. What has this got to do with computing? The answer is that Schreyer was an engineer and he and Zuse talked endlessly about computers during the rehearsals. Schreyer suggested that Zuse used valves as the switching element in the logic gates. The fact the Zuse's machine was based on logic gates implied that you could build it using any technology suitable for implementing logic gates. Valves were fast switches but they were expensive and with the limited backing that Zuse had secured they were well beyond his reach. However the pair did realise that a valve computer was a possibility and so saw the future while playing King Kong. Schreyer used the ideas in his doctoral thesis in 1938 even though Zuse had to return to relays for the Z3. When the war started in 1939 Zuse was drafted into the army. As a leading specialist developing machines vital to the war effort?No as a simple soldier. The German government took no interest in computers and saw them as irrelevant. Why? The reason may have been that the German military thought that the war was almost won and so any military research needed to be of short duration. What was the point of building a military computer when its completion date would have been beyond the end of the war? With World War II already in progress Zuse and Schreyer did proposed a high-speed computer specifically for code cracking and were asked if it would take more than a year to build. When they admitted that, yes, it would take more than a year, the authorities dismissed it as irrelevant to the war effort! Despite the lack of government funding, the Z3 was completed in 1941 and it worked. Costing $6,500 and with 2,600 relays it was built for the German Aircraft Research Institute and intended for stress analysis. It was the first fully programmable calculator and was a Turing complete machine,meaning that given enough time it could compute anything a modern computer could. As such it has a very strong claim to being the world's first programmable computer. Konrad Zuse with the Z3 The arithmetic unit could add, subtract, multiply and divide, but it was slow for the tasks that it was designed for. It took about a third of a second for an addition and three to five seconds to multiply two 22-bit numbers. Its memory could store only sixty-four 22-bit numbers, but for a relay machine this was a lot of storage. The machine was built into three cabinets, had an operator's console and was controlled by a 35mm film tape reader. Its main task was to solve simultaneous equations by evaluating the determinant of a complex matrix. Although the original did not survive, Zuse's company reconstructed the Z2 in 1961 primarily for patent and demonstration purposes. This replica now resides at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. This reconstruction of Z3 was made by Zuse KG, Bad Hersfeld, for the 1964 Interdata Industry Fair For more about Zuse and the computers he built, see this article in our History section: Konrad Zuse and the First Working Computers To be informed about new articles on I Programmer, sign up for our weekly newsletter, subscribe to the RSS feed and follow us on Twitter, Facebook or Linkedin.
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Last Updated ( Monday, 19 May 2025 ) |