The replica of Z3 on display in a museum.
| Photo Credit: Batch upload check individual sources for credit
Few fields have grown as rapidly as computing and computers have. If you are lucky to know aged people who’ve worked in the field, they might well tell you about the size and computing power of the devices at their disposal in their younger days. Your parents and teachers themselves should be able to tell you how rapidly things have changed in this area in the span of a few decades. And you yourself should be fully aware that the gadgets that we now carry in our palms probably are more powerful than the first computers that were built and occupied entire rooms!
Turing completeness
In computer science, there is a term called Turing completeness, named after famed English mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing. It describes the ability of a system to compute any possible calculation or programme. In other words, a system of rules is Turing-complete if it can be used to simulate any Turing machine. Z3, a computer built by German engineer Konrad Zuse, was the world’s first fully-functional programmable computer that was Turing complete.
Picture of Konrad Zuse at the German Museum of Technology in Berlin.
| Photo Credit:
Batch upload check individual sources for credit
Zuse (pronounced Crash-zuh) was born on June 22, 1910 in Deutsch-Wilmersdorf, now part of Berlin. He impressed his faculty during his school days with his many talents, but Zuse was most interested in painting.
An artsy engineer
For someone who went on to become an engineer and change the face of computing, Zuse enjoyed drawing. His Latin lecturer at school once discovered Zuse’s drawings of locomotives, and promptly brought it to the attention of the drawing master. In addition to being able to produce precise depiction of models, Zuse had an innate ability for caricatures and even considered a career as a commercial artist.
After he completed schooling, Zuse switched from mechanical engineering to study architecture, before finally settling on civil engineering. He believed that this would be perfect for him as it would enable him to combine the skills of an engineer and an artist.
Boring calculations
While he obtained a degree in civil engineering in 1935, it wasn’t long before he was bored of all the tedium involved in the calculations that he constantly had to handle in his chosen stream. In 1936, he began assembling metal plates, pins and discarded movie film in his parents’ living room and the result was Z1 – the first of many mechanical computers that he built – in 1938.
From someone who worked on his own with the help of family members and close friends, Zuse soon had an assistant and also the backing of professors who supported his computer project. With the world about to be at war again, this backing was essential, as it afforded Zuse to be excused from military service and instead concentrate on his research.
Starts from scratch
Zuse’s brilliance lies in the fact that he literally built everything from scratch, having been unaware of even the internal structure of calculators of the time. This did prove to be an advantage, albeit in an unusual way. While the calculators of the era were based on the decimal system and used rotating mechanical components, Zuse went about building machines that employed the binary system and metallic shafts that just switched one way or the other.
As Germany was soon embroiled in World War II, German researchers, including Zuse, were forced to work in relative isolation. This meant that Zuse had no idea that Howard Aiken, backed by IBM, was working on a similar project in the U.S. and there was no knowledge sharing between the two.
Zuse’s painting in a street in Berlin.
| Photo Credit:
Batch upload check individual sources for credit
While Z1 was unreliable and worked at best for a few minutes before getting stuck, Zuse had better luck in his next attempts. He came up with Z2 in 1940, but it is his Z3 of 1941 that is considered his crown jewel.
On May 12, 1941, Zuse presented his Z3 at the German Laboratory for Aviation in Berlin. It is now considered the world’s first functional, automatic, programmable, Turing-complete computer.
Unfortunately though, most of the world never got to see the Z3 as the original was destroyed in 1943 itself during a bombing in Berlin. Zuse, however, did work on reconstructing the Z3 in the 1960s and that replica is now on display in a museum at Munich.