Konrad Zuse
More info
- Born
- Died
- Known for
- Z3, Z4, Plankalkül
- Nationality
- German
Built the world's first programmable automatic computer in his parents' living room in Berlin, and only learned of everyone else's work afterwards.
Zuse was a civil engineer, tired of computing structural tables by hand. The Z1 (1938) was fully mechanical and unreliable; the Z3, finished on 12 May 1941, was built from some 2,000 telephone relays and worked in binary floating point — a combination that stayed unusual well into the 1950s. The program was read from perforated film. The Z3 was destroyed in a 1943 bombing raid, but the Z4 was moved to safety and leased in 1950 to ETH Zürich, where it became continental Europe's only working computer.
The war cut him off from Bletchley Park and Philadelphia, and his application for funding to build a vacuum-tube machine was rejected as not important to the war effort. Instead, between 1942 and 1945, he wrote Plankalkül, generally counted as the first high-level programming language. It was not published until 1972 and first ran in 1998.