Inventor of the Modern Computer

                                                       Konrard Zuse Z1 Circa 1939

                                                                         Konrard Zuse


                           

Konrad Zuse (1910-1995) was a construction engineer for the Henschel Aircraft Company in Berlin, Germany at the beginning of WWII. Konrad Zuse earned the semiofficial title of "inventor of the modern computer" for his series of automatic calculators, which he invented to help him with his lengthy engineering calculations. Zuse has modestly dismissed the title while praising many of the inventions of his contemporaries and successors as being equally if not more important than his own. One of the most difficult aspects of doing a large calculation with either a slide rule or a mechanical adding machine is keeping track of all intermediate results and using them, in their proper place, in later steps of the calculation. Konrad Zuse wanted to overcome that difficulty. He realized that an automatic-calculator device would require three basic elements: a control, a memory, and a calculator for the arithmetic.

                             

In 1936, Zuse made a mechanical calculator called the Z1, the first binary computer. Zuse used it to explore several groundbreaking technologies in calculator development: floating-point arithmetic, high-capacity memory and modules or relays operating on the yes/no principle. Zuse's ideas, not fully implemented in the Z1, succeeded more with each Z prototype. In 1939, Zuse completed the Z2, the first fully functioning electro-mechanical computer. Konrad Zuse completed the Z3 in 1941, with recycled materials donated by fellow university staff and students. This was the world's first electronic, fully programmable digital computer based on a binary floating-point number and switching system. Zuse used old movie film to store his programs and data for the Z3, instead of using paper tape or punched cards. Paper was in short supply in Germany during the war. According to "The Life and Work of Konrad Zuse" (by Horst Zuse) In 1941, the Z3 contained almost all of the features of a modern computer as defined by John von Neumann and his colleagues in 1946. The only exception was the ability to store the program in the memory together with the data. Konrad Zuse did not implement this feature in the Z3, because his 64-word memory was too small to support this mode of operation. Due to the fact that he wanted to calculate thousands of instructions in a meaningful order, he only used the memory to store values or numbers. The block structure of the Z3 is very similar to a modern computer. The Z3 consisted of separate units, such as a punch tape reader, control unit, floating-point arithmetic unit, and input/output devices.