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Pre-WWII work and the Z1 Born in Berlin, Germany, Zuse graduated in civil engineering from the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg (today the Technische Universität Berlin or Technical University of Berlin) in 1935. During his engineering studies, Zuse had to perform many routine calculations by hand, which he found mind-numbingly boring. This experience led him to dream about performing calculations by machine. He started work as a design engineer at the Henschel aircraft factory in Dessau, but only one year later he resigned from his job to build a program driven/programmable machine. Working in his parents' apartment in 1936, his first attempt, called the Z1, was a binary electrically driven mechanical calculator with limited programmability, reading instructions from punched tape. The Z1 never worked well, though, due to the lack of sufficiently precise parts. The Z1 and its original blueprints were destroyed during World War II. The WWII years; the Z2, Z3, and Z4 World War II made it impossible and undesirable for Zuse and contemporary German computer scientists to work with similar scientists in the UK and the USA, or even to stay in contact. In 1939, Zuse was called for military service but was able to convince the army to let him return to building his computers. In 1940, he gained support from the Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt (AVA, Aerodynamic Research Institute), which used his work for the production of glide bombs. Zuse built the Z2, a revised version of his machine, from telephone relays. The same year, he started a company, Zuse Apparatebau (Zuse Apparatus Engineering), to manufacture his programmable machines. Satisfied with the function of the basic Z2 machine, he built the Z3 and completed it in 1941. It was a binary 64-bit floating point calculator featuring programmability with loops but without conditional jumps, with memory and a calculation unit based on telephone relays. Despite the absence of conditional jumps as convenient instructions, the Z3 was a Turing complete computer (ignoring the fact that no physical computer can be truly Turing complete due to limited storage size). However, its Turing-completeness was never envisioned by Zuse (who had practical applications in mind) and only proven in 1998 (see History of computing hardware). Zuse never received the official support that computer pioneers in Allied countries, such as Alan Turing, managed to get. The telephone relays used in his machines were largely collected from discarded stock. A request by his co-worker Helmut Schreyer to the war-time government for federal funding for an electronic successor to the Z3 was denied as "strategically unimportant". Zuse's company, together with the Z3, was destroyed in 1945 by an Allied attack. Fortunately, the partially finished, relay-based Z4 had been moved to a safe place earlier. Zuse designed the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül, from 1941 to 1945, although he did not publish it in its entirety until 1972. No compiler or interpreter was available for Plankalkül until a team from the Free University of Berlin implemented it in 2000, five years after Zuse died. Zuse the entrepreneur In 1946 Zuse founded the world's first computer startup company: the Zuse-Ingenieurbüro Hopferau. Venture capital was raised through ETH Zürich and an IBM option on Zuse's patents. Zuse founded another company, Zuse KG, in 1949. The Z4 was finished and delivered to the ETH Zürich, Switzerland in September 1950. At that time, it was the only working computer in continental Europe, and the first computer in the world to be sold, beating the Ferranti Mark I by five months and the UNIVAC I by ten months. Other computers, all numbered with a leading Z, were built by Zuse and his company. Notable are the Z11, which was sold to the optics industry and to universities, and the Z22, the first computer with a memory based on magnetic storage. By 1967, the Zuse KG had built a total of 251 computers. Due to financial problems, it was then sold to Siemens. Calculating Space; Z1 resurrection In 1967 Zuse also suggested that the universe itself is running on a grid of computers (digital physics); in 1969 he published the book Rechnender Raum (translated by MIT into English as Calculating Space, 1970). Since the publication of Stephen Wolfram's book A New Kind of Science, this idea has attracted a lot of attention, since there is no compelling physical evidence against Zuse's thesis. Critics of Wolfram's work claim that the fundamental ideas are essentially due to Zuse. Between 1987 and 1989, Zuse recreated the Z1, suffering a heart-attack midway through the project. The final result had 30,000 components, cost 800,000 DM, and required four individuals (including Zuse) to assemble it. Funding for this retrocomputing project was provided by Siemens and a consortium of around five companies. Zuse received several awards for his work. After he retired, he focused on his hobby, painting. Zuse died on December 18 1995 in Hünfeld, Germany, near Fulda. Quotation See also | ||||||||||
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