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Konrad Zuse and the digital revolution he started 75 years ago

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Re: Konrad Zuse and the digital revolution he started 75 years ago

#41
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Babbage invented the concept of the programmable computer, Zuse built a programmable electronic computer, which could later be shown to be turing-complete. Those things are pretty subtle, and the 'national' version is always the least subtle, I guess ;) Leonardo da Vinci also invented tanks and helicopters, and then it took a couple of hundred years to build some.

Slight difference - da Vinci's tanks and helicopters wouldn't actually have worked, whereas the Analytical Engine absolutely would have.

"Absolutely would have worked" is probably the closest you can get to modern software development ;)

Or more seriously put: It's a concept for a machine with 55k moving parts and powered by a steam engine. "Would work" is probably a bold statement considering how far off theoretical designs always are from the engineering reality, by all experience.

Re: Konrad Zuse and the digital revolution he started 75 years ago

#42
post #10
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charles Babbage is as far as I know the uncontested inventor of the computer, which somehow even German schools teach about.

Was it Turing complete? Because Zuse's Z3 was. I'm not saying though, that this is a criteria for calling any machine a computer. But it's probably what sets Zuse's achievement apart. UPDATE: I've just learned that Babbage's language was also Turing complete. So Zuse's achievement is solely having physically built the first working computer, while Babbage's machine was never realized.

> So Zuse's achievement is solely having physically built the first working computer, while Babbage's machine was never realized.

And the fact that Z3 was based on binary, while the analytical engine wasn't.

Re: Konrad Zuse and the digital revolution he started 75 years ago

#43

Zuse is an interesting example of history being written by the victors. Ask any German who invented the computer and they'll tell you it was Konrad Zuse, but he is almost completely unknown elsewhere. Turing did brilliant work, but Zuse did the job of Turing and Tommy Flowers, working in isolation with very limited resources.

As a German, I'm pretty sure most Germans have no idea who invented the computer or think it was someone in America. My parents, and I think the same goes for many others, heard the name of this guy for the first time today, when newspapers and radio programs brought short articles about him. One reason may be that, at least when I was in school, in computer science classes, no history about that field was taught at…

It's a bit sad how many misconceptions about .. just about everything. I wish people would like to unfold origins, history with precision. Not sure if they don't care, prefer to be fed a nice story, or just don't have the time.

Re: Konrad Zuse and the digital revolution he started 75 years ago

#44
post #8
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person who invented the computer. Which somehow no US school teaches about. He also developed a very awesome high-level language very early on.

Charles Babbage is as far as I know the uncontested inventor of the computer, which somehow even German schools teach about.

If all we're going for is "first $something computer" then Leibniz probably wins.

Re: Konrad Zuse and the digital revolution he started 75 years ago

#45
"And, thanks to Konrad Zuse, computers and computer networks are what we have."

Holy smokes, what an inaccurate statement. Arguably one of the obstacles to progress in technology is due the persistence of the fundamental computer design that has been employed since "Baby" ran its first program just before lunch on June 21, 1948, including an approach to fast random memory accesses. This approach was novel, based on CRTs used in radar. Most everything else -- design-wise -- was from the Moore School Lectures of 1946. And the really inspirational part of those was from the work on the ENIAC.

The missing piece that needs to be more generally appreciated is how the early work on practical, general-purpose computers was quietly done in England while the Americans were squabbling over who was first.

Re: Konrad Zuse and the digital revolution he started 75 years ago

#46

Zuse is an interesting example of history being written by the victors. Ask any German who invented the computer and they'll tell you it was Konrad Zuse, but he is almost completely unknown elsewhere. Turing did brilliant work, but Zuse did the job of Turing and Tommy Flowers, working in isolation with very limited resources.

I never realized that Zuse is unknown in the US. I am Austrian and I am pretty sure I have learned about Zuse in school. I assume the situation in Germany is similar. Now I am curious what people from other countries were taught. Did you learn anything about Zuse?

i only know about him because of my attraction to unusual ideas brought me once to a page about rechnender raum when i was a teenager.

Re: Konrad Zuse and the digital revolution he started 75 years ago

#47
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Charles Babbage is as far as I know the uncontested inventor of the computer, which somehow even German schools teach about.

Which creates the interesting questions of: 1. Is da Vinci (or someone earlier) the inventor of the helicopter? Does invention include something working? 2. What is a computer? A calculator? Is the Antikythera a computer? Does it need to be Turing complete? 3. Didn't hear about Babbage in 13y of German schools ;-) But then what are schools? Is university included in "school"?

Technically the first computers were (mainly) females who were good at maths and were put forward to compute maths tables for the navy. In fact the reason that we call (modern) computers by that name is because they are named after the original humans who did the job. In fact Babbage worked on the calculation engine(s) precisely to aid in the automated calculations that they would be providing, including identifying several corrections in log tables that were printed around that time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer

The first electromechanical computers were arguably the Lorenz machine (reconstruction at TNMOC next to Bletchley Park) and the Bombe (a reconstruction of which is available at Bletchley park). The first electrical only computer was ENIAC, though you tend not to hear about these from American historians as some of these facts were classified until (relatively) recently.

Re: Konrad Zuse and the digital revolution he started 75 years ago

#48

Zuse is an interesting example of history being written by the victors. Ask any German who invented the computer and they'll tell you it was Konrad Zuse, but he is almost completely unknown elsewhere. Turing did brilliant work, but Zuse did the job of Turing and Tommy Flowers, working in isolation with very limited resources.

Zuse is known to everyone who's taken even a fairly superficial look at the history of the development of computing machines. It's also inaccurate to compare his work to Turing's, Zuse's focus was practical. He certainly did not independently develop Turing's theoretical work, nor did he really need to for his purposes.

Re: Konrad Zuse and the digital revolution he started 75 years ago

#50
So, Zuse's development were indeed important, but the Zuse Z3 had in important limitation that the article doesn't mention, which leads some people to not count it as "first": The Z3 was largely not Turing complete.

This is because the Z3 had no conditional branching. In 1998 it was shown that the Z3 actually didn't need conditional branching, and it was Turing complete but only because it is possible to unroll conditional statements into a version where both branches are evaluated and then the result of one is cancelled. However, at the time of the Z3's development and use, this wasn't known.

So while the Z3 is indeed an important early computer, it shares a significant discontinuity with modern computing that reflects the time. The Z3 was not intended as a "computer" in the modern sense, it was more of a calculating machine that could perform repeat arithmetic more quickly. It was never intended for the more complex roles we use computers in today.

A lot of people don't count the Z3 as the first programmable digital computer because of this limitation. If you disqualify it for that reason, the title probably goes to the British Colossus the next year.

Obviously Zuse did develop conditional branching (such as in his language Plankalkül), but that was years later and by then it had already been done by others. To Zuse's credit, he probably would have gotten to it much faster had he not had a real problem with allied bombing destroying his work.

A major takeaway from this is that assigning titles like "first" and "inventor of computing" is quite silly. Computer science developed very, very quickly, with many of it key developments made by multiple people in parallel. We are largely familiar with what happened in the West for sociopolitical reasons, but similar work was done in Germany and the Soviet Union, often successfully. However, calling Zuse the inventor of computer science is as uncharitable to Turing as the reverse is to Zuse, both had their successes and failures.

When I give talks on computer history, I often like to say things like "Steve Jobs, inventor of the Computer" to elicit a laugh. The unfortunate thing is that sometimes people don't realize that it's a joke.

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