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On May 12, 1941, German engineer Konrad Zuse stood before an audience in Berlin and demonstrated the Z3. For the first time in history, a machine that was both fully automatic and fully programmable existed. Despite this incredible feat, at the time of its breakthrough, it was not celebrated.
Notably, Germany was in the middle of the Second World War. Zuse spent most of his time building his machines in his parents' apartment with limited funding and little institutional support. What he had created, however, would eventually be recognized as the first true programmable computer ever built.
Who was Konrad Zuse?
Konrad Zuse was a civil engineering student who found the manual calculations required for structural engineering so tedious that he decided to build a machine to do them for him. This, in fact, is the origin story of computing: an engineer’s impatience with repetitive arithmetic. Zuse’s first attempt was called the Z1, and was a mechanical calculator he built in his parents' living room between 1936 and 1938. While it was a strong start, it was only partially functional and unreliable. The Z2 shortly followed. It was more successful, but still lacking. Finally, the Z3 was created.
What made the Z3 revolutionary?
Three models, each with incredibly similar names — but what differentiates the third version from the other two? More broadly, why did the Z3 stand out from earlier calculating machines?
First, it was programmable. Instead of having to physically reconfigure the machine, instructions could be fed into it on punched tape, allowing it to execute different sequences of calculations more efficiently. Second, it used binary arithmetic, representing all numbers in base-2 (ones and zeros) instead of the decimal system, which becomes convoluted. Third, it included floating-point arithmetic, allowing it to handle numbers of vastly different scales without losing precision. Ever since the Z3 pioneered these three features, they have become foundational to every computer built since.
The Z3 performed calculations using telephone relay switches (electromagnetic components that could be toggled between on and off states), representing the binary values 1 and 0. It could execute about five to ten operations per second, which sounds pretty slow by modern standards but was a genuine marvel in 1941. Unfortunately, the original Z3 was destroyed in a 1943 Allied bombing raid on Berlin. A fully functional replica is now housed at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
The history of computing
The story of who invented the computer is very complicated and heavily contested, mainly because many innovators played a role in the development of the machine. For instance, Alan Turing developed the theoretical framework for computation in the 1930s, but John Atanasoff and Clifford Berry built an early electronic computer around the same time as Zuse. Additionally, the ENIAC, which is often cited as the first general-purpose electronic computer, came online in 1945. Each of these figures contributed something distinct to the emerging field.
What makes Zuse’s contribution pretty remarkable, however, is how it was developed in isolation. Having worked in his parents’ home, Zuse advanced his ideas independently without any knowledge of the work happening in the United States and Britain. The German military, which might have funded his work, famously decided that winning the war would take less time than it would take Zuse to build a working machine, therefore declining to support him. They were wrong about the war, but Zuse built the machine regardless.
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