Free The Dead Media Notebook by Bruce Sterling, Richard Kadrey, Tom Jennings, Tom Whitwell Page B

HD9696.C772B87 1994.
     

the Zuse Ziffernrechner; the V1, Z1, Z2, Z3 and Z4 program-controlled electromechanical digital computers; the death of Konrad Zuse
    [Konrad Zuse, legendary computer pioneer, died December 18, 1995. The following obituaries and personal reminiscences cast several interesting sidelights on the birth of digital computation and the mishaps of Zuse’s museum-piece computers.]
    From the Guardian newspaper in Britain:
    FIRST ON THE DIGITAL TRACK by Jack Schofield
KONRAD ZUSE, who invented the digital computer while no one else was looking, has died in Berlin at the age of 85. He was born in Berlin-Wilmersdorf and built his first mechanical calculating machine in his parents’ living room between 1936 and 1938. In Britain and the US. similar but later developments were supported for their military significance, but Zuse’s work was largely ignored.
    When he and his colleagues later proposed the construction of a 2,000-tube computer for special use in anti-aircraft defence, they were asked how long it would take. Zuse says they replied: “Around two years.” The response to this was: “And just how long do you think it’ll take us to win the war?”
    Zuse started to develop his ideas about computing in 1934, a year before he graduated from the Technische Hochschule with a degree in civil engineering. He then went to work for the Henschel aircraft company as a design engineer or statiker. This involved solving tedious linear equations, which stimulated Zuse to apply his ideas and try to build a system to solve them automatically. His first machine, the V1 (with hindsight renamed the Z1) was made of pins and steel plates, but it represented two dramatic advances.
    First. it was a general purpose machine, whereas most calculating machines were dedicated to specific tasks.
    Second, it used binary (on/off or stop/start) numbers instead of decimal ones, as Babbage’s far earlier machines had done.
    This made Zuse’s machine far easier to construct, although it was to remain somewhat unreliable. Although both decisions seem obvious now, they were far from obvious at the time. Zuse’s choice of a general purpose approach was based on his separation of the different elements: an arithmetic unit to do the calculations, a memory for storing numbers, a control system to supervise operations, plus input and output stages.
    This is still the basis of modern computers. Babbage had taken the same line 100 years earlier with his analytical engine, but it proved too difficult to build. Zuse succeeded partly because he chose the binary numbering system instead of using decimals. Binary means counting in twos, which is far more long-winded than counting in tens. However, to count in twos you only need an on/off switch, which is very much easier to construct than the 10-position decimal equivalent. Each operation mav not do much work. but the speed of the simpler switching operation makes up for it.
    Of course, mechanical switches are still somewhat primitive, and Zuse started to replace bulky mechanical ones in Z1 with second-hand electro-magnetic relays - the switches used in telephone systems.
    At the time, Zuse’s college friend Helmut Schreyer “suddenly had the bright idea of using vacuum tubes. At first I thought it was one of his student pranks.” Vacuum tubes, or valves, would work the same way but work at least a thousand times faster.
    Zuse was soon convinced it was the right approach, and this led to the design of the Z3, which was probably the first operational, general-purpose, programmable computer. Zuse sold the idea to the Aerodynamics Research Institute, and set up a 15-man company to construct it. The machine was completed by December 1941, though it was later destroyed by Allied bombing.
    As Zuse recalled, the “construction of the Z3 was interrupted in 1939 when I was called up for military service. However, in my spare time, and with the help of friends, I was able to complete the machine.”