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Konrad Zuse

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Konrad Zuse
Konrad Zuse in 1992
Born(1910-06-22)22 June 1910
Berlin, German Empire
Died18 December 1995(1995-12-18) (aged 85)
Hünfeld, Germany
Alma materTechnical University of Berlin
Known forZ3, Z4
Plankalkül
Calculating Space (cf. digital physics)
AwardsWerner-von-Siemens-Ring in 1964,
Harry H. Goode Memorial Award in 1965 (together with George Stibitz),
Great Cross of Merit in 1972
Computer History Museum Fellow Award in 1999 - weblink
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
InstitutionsAerodynamic Research Institute

Konrad Zuse (pronounced [ˈkɔnʁat ˈtsuːzə] KON-rad ZUE-zuh; 22 June 1910 Berlin – 18 December 1995 Hünfeld near Fulda) was a German engineer and computer pioneer. His greatest achievement was the world's first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, the Z3, which became operational in May 1941. He received the Werner-von-Siemens-Ring in 1964 for the Z3.[1] Much of his early work was financed by his family and commerce, but after 1939 he was given resources by the Nazi German Government.[2]

Zuse's S2 computing machine is considered to be the first process-controlled computer. In 1946 he designed the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül.[3] Zuse founded one of the earliest computer businesses on 1 April 1941 (Zuse Ingenieurbüro und Apparatebau).[4] This company built the Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer.

Due to World War II Zuse's work went largely unnoticed in the UK and the US. Possibly his first documented influence on a US company was IBM's option on his patents in 1946. In the late 1960s, Zuse suggested the concept of a Calculating Space (a computation-based universe).

There is a replica of the Z3, as well as the Z4, in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. The Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin has an exhibition devoted to Zuse, displaying twelve of his machines, including a replica of the Z1 (the "mechanical brain"), some original documents, including the specifications of Plankalkül, and several of Zuse's paintings.

Pre-WWII work and the Z1

Zuse Z1 replica in the German Museum of Technology in Berlin

Born in Berlin, Germany in 1910, he moved with his family in 1912 to Braunsberg, East Prussia, where his father was a postal clerk. Zuse attended the Collegium Hosianum in Braunsberg. In 1923 the family moved to Hoyerswerda, where he passed his Abitur in 1928, qualifying him to enter university.

He enrolled in the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg and explored both engineering and architecture, but found them boring. Zuse then pursued civil engineering, graduating in 1935. For a time he worked for the Ford Motor Company, using his considerable artistic skills in the design of advertisements.[3] He started work as a design engineer at the Henschel aircraft factory in Berlin-Schönefeld. This required the performance of many routine calculations by hand, which he found mind-numbingly boring, leading him to dream of performing calculations by machine.

Working in his parents' apartment in 1936, his first attempt, called the Z1, was a floating point binary mechanical calculator with limited programmability, reading instructions from a perforated 35 mm film.[3] In 1937 Zuse submitted two patents that anticipated a von Neumann architecture. He finished the Z1 in 1938. The Z1 contained some 30,000 metal parts and never worked well, due to insufficient mechanical precision. The Z1 and its original blueprints were destroyed during WWII.

Between 1987 and 1989, Zuse recreated the Z1, suffering a heart attack midway through the project. It 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 five companies.

The Z2, Z3, and Z4

Statue of Zuse in Bad Hersfeld

Zuse completed his work entirely independently of other leading computer scientists and mathematicians of his day. Between 1936 and 1945, he was in near-total intellectual isolation.[5] In 1939, Zuse was called for military service, where he was given the resources to ultimately build the Z2.[6] Zuse built the Z2, a revised version of the Z1, using telephone relays. The same year, he started a company, Zuse Apparatebau (Zuse Apparatus Engineering), to manufacture his machines.

Improving on the basic Z2 machine, he built the Z3 in 1941. It was a binary 22-bit floating point calculator featuring programmability with loops but without conditional jumps, with memory and a calculation unit based on telephone relays. The telephone relays used in his machines were largely collected from discarded stock. Despite the absence of conditional jumps, the Z3 was a Turing complete computer (ignoring the fact that no physical computer can be truly Turing complete because of limited storage size). However, Turing-completeness was never considered by Zuse (who had practical applications in mind) and only demonstrated in 1998 (see History of computing hardware).

The Z3, the first fully operational electromechanical computer, was partially financed by German government-supported DVL (Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt, i.e. German Experimentation-Institution for Aviation), which wanted their extensive calculations automated. A request by his co-worker Helmut Schreyer — who had helped Zuse build the Z3 prototype in 1938[7] — for government funding for an electronic successor to the Z3 was denied as "strategically unimportant".

In 1937 Schreyer had advised Zuse to use vacuum tubes as switching elements; Zuse at this time considered it a crazy idea ("Schnapsidee" in his own words). Zuse's company (with the Z1, Z2 and Z3) was destroyed in 1945 by an Allied air attack. The partially finished, relay-based Z4, which Zuse had begun constructing in 1942,[8] had been moved to a safe location earlier. Work on the Z4 could not continue in the extreme privation of post-war Germany, and it was not until 1949 that he was able to resume work on it. He showed it to the mathematician Eduard Stiefel of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (ETH) Zürich) who ordered one in 1950. On 8 November 1949 Zuse KG was founded. The Z4 was delivered to ETH Zurich on 12 July 1950, and proved very reliable.[3]

S1 and S2

In 1940, the German government began funding him through the Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt (AVA, Aerodynamic Research Institute),[9] which used his work for the production of glide bombs. Zuse built the S1 and S2 computing machines, which were special purpose devices which computed aerodynamic corrections to the wings of radio-controlled flying bombs. The S2 featured an integrated analog-to-digital converter under program control, making it the first process-controlled computer.[8]

These machines contributed to the Henschel Werke Hs 293 and Hs 294 developed by the German military between 1941 and 1945, which were the precursor to the modern cruise missile.[8][10][11] The circuit design of the S1 was the predecessor of Zuse's Z11.[8] Zuse believed that these machines had been captured by occupying Soviet troops in 1945.[8]

Plankalkül

Main article: Plankalkül

While working on his Z4 computer, Zuse realised that programming in machine code was too complicated, so he designed the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül ("Plan Calculus"), in 1945/6. This was first published in 1948,[3] although not in its entirety until 1972. It was a theoretical contribution, since the language was not implemented in his lifetime and did not directly influence subsequent early languages. One of the inventors of ALGOL (Heinz Rutishauser) wrote: "The very first attempt to devise an algorithmic language was undertaken in 1948 by K. Zuse. His notation was quite general, but the proposal never attained the consideration it deserved." No compiler or interpreter was available for Plankalkül until a team from the Free University of Berlin implemented one in 2000.

Marriage and family

Konrad Zuse married Gisela Brandes in January 1945 - employing a carriage, himself dressed in tailcoat and top hat and with Gisela in wedding veil, for Zuse attached importance to a "noble ceremony." Their son Horst, the first of five children, was born in November 1945.

Zuse the entrepreneur

Zuse's workshop at Neukirchen (situation January 2010)
Magnetic drum storage inside a Z31 (which was first displayed in 1963).

In 1946 Zuse founded one of the earliest computer companies: the Zuse-Ingenieurbüro Hopferau. Capital was raised through ETH Zurich and an IBM option on Zuse's patents.

Zuse founded another company, Zuse KG in Haunetal-Neukirchen in 1949; in 1957 the company’s head office moved to Bad Hersfeld. The Z4 was finished and delivered to the ETH Zurich, Switzerland in September 1950. At that time, it was the only working computer in continental Europe, and the second computer in the world to be sold, only beaten by the BINAC, which never worked properly after it was delivered. Other computers, all numbered with a leading Z, up to Z43,[12] 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.[13]

By 1967, the Zuse KG had built a total of 251 computers. Due to financial problems, the company was then sold to Siemens.

Calculating Space

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 into English as Calculating Space). This idea has attracted a lot of attention, since there is no physical evidence against Zuse's thesis. Edward Fredkin (1980s), Juergen Schmidhuber (1990s), Stephen Wolfram (A New Kind of Science) and others have expanded on it.

Zuse received several awards for his work. After he retired, he focused on his hobby, painting. Zuse died on 18 December 1995 in Hünfeld, Germany, near Fulda.

Awards

Zuse Year 2010

The 100th anniversary of the birth of this computer pioneer was celebrated by exhibitions, lectures and workshops to remember his life and work and to bring attention to the importance of his invention to the digital age.[14][15] The movie Tron Legacy, which revolves around a world inside a computer system, also features a character named Zuse, presumably in honour of Konrad Zuse.

Literature

  • Konrad Zuse: The Computer - My Life, Springer Verlag, ISBN 3-540-56453-5, ISBN 0-387-56453-5
  • Jürgen Alex, Hermann Flessner, Wilhelm Mons, Horst Zuse: Konrad Zuse: Der Vater des Computers. Parzeller, Fulda 2000, ISBN 3-7900-0317-4
  • Raul Rojas (Hrsg.): Die Rechenmaschinen von Konrad Zuse. Springer, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-540-63461-4.
  • Jürgen Alex: Wege und Irrwege des Konrad Zuse. In: Spektrum der Wissenschaft (dt. Ausgabe von Scientific American) 1/1997, ISSN 0170-2971.
  • Hadwig Dorsch: Der erste Computer. Konrad Zuses Z1 - Berlin 1936. Beginn und Entwicklung einer technischen Revolution. Mit Beiträgen von Konrad Zuse und Otto Lührs. Museum für Verkehr und Technik, Berlin 1989.
  • Clemens Kieser: „Ich bin zu faul zum Rechnen“ - Konrad Zuses Computer Z22 im Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe. In: Denkmalpflege in Baden-Württemberg, 4/34/2005, Esslingen am Neckar, S. 180-184, ISSN 0342-0027.
  • Arno Peters: Was ist und wie verwirklicht sich Computer-Sozialismus: Gespräche mit Konrad Zuse. Verlag Neues Leben, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-355-01510-5.
  • Paul Janositz: Informatik und Konrad Zuse: Der Pionier des Computerbaus in Europa – Das verkannte Genie aus Adlershof. In: Der Tagesspiegel Nr. 19127, Berlin, 9. März 2006, Beilage Seite B3.
  • Jürgen Alex: Zum Einfluß elementarer Sätze der mathematischen Logik bei Alfred Tarski auf die drei Computerkonzepte des Konrad Zuse. TU Chemnitz 2006.
  • Jürgen Alex: Zur Entstehung des Computers - von Alfred Tarski zu Konrad Zuse. VDI-Verlag, Düsseldorf 2007, ISBN 978-3-18-150051-4, ISSN 0082-2361.

See also

References

  1. ^ Konrad Zuse: Biography
  2. ^ "Weapons Grade: How Modern Warfare Gave Birth To Our High-Tech World", David Hambling. Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2006. ISBN 0786717696, 9780786717699. Retrieved March 14, 2010.
  3. ^ a b c d e Talk given by Horst Zuse to the Computer Conservation Society at the Science Museum (London) on 18 November 2010
  4. ^ Lippe, Prof. Dr. Wolfram. "Kapitel 14 - Die ersten programmierbaren Rechner (i.e. The first programmable computers)" (PDF). Retrieved 2010-06-21.
  5. ^ "Konrad Zuse", Gap System. Retrieved March 14, 2010.
  6. ^ "Weapons Grade: How Modern Warfare Gave Birth To Our High-Tech World", David Hambling. Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2006. ISBN 0786717696, 9780786717699. Retrieved March 14, 2010.
  7. ^ "Handbook of research on open source software", Kirk St. Amant, Brian Still. Idea Group Inc (IGI), 2007. ISBN 1591409993, 9781591409991. Retrieved March 14, 2010.
  8. ^ a b c d e "My computer, my life", Konrad Zuse. Springer, 1993. ISBN 3540564535, 9783540564539. Retrieved March 14, 2010.
  9. ^ "Mathematicians during the Third Reich and World War II", Technische Universität München. Retrieved March 14, 2010.
  10. ^ "Germany's Secret Weapons in World War II", Roger Ford. Zenith Imprint, 2000. ISBN 0760308470, 9780760308479. Retrieved March 14, 2010.
  11. ^ "The S1 and S2 Computing Machines — Konrad Zuse´s Work for the German Military 1941–1945", Atypon Link. Retrieved March 14, 2010.
  12. ^ Z43
  13. ^ Biography of Konrad Zuse, by Prof. Horst Zuse - epemag.com
  14. ^ http://www.zuse-jahr-2010.de Zuse-Jahr 2010 (Zuse Year 2010)
  15. ^ http://www.sdtb.de/Medieninfo-Zuse-Jahr-2010-zum-100-Geburtstag-d.1642.0.html German Museum of Technology - 100 years since Zuse's birth
  • Zuse, Konrad (1993). The Computer – My Life. Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag. ISBN 0-387-56453-5 (translated from the original German edition (1984): Der Computer – Mein Lebenswerk. Springer. ISBN 3-540-56292-3.)
  • Zuse, Konrad (1969). Rechnender Raum Braunschweig: Vieweg & Sohn. ISBN 3-528-09609-8
  • Rechnender Raum (PDF document), Elektronische Datenverarbeitung, 8: 336–344, 1967.
  • Calculating Space English translation as PDF document

External links

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