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The long lost manual for the Zuse Z4 has been found

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Re: The long lost manual for the Zuse Z4 has been found

#51
post #10

There's a very lively startup scene in Berlin, but no-one in that scene seems to know that the world's first digital computer was built in Berlin. There's an obscure and easy to miss sign ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse#/media/File:2007-0... ) on the house he lived in while working on it, and another sign at the technical university, but that's about it. No big festivities in his name, no commemorations,…

Boasting about national achievements is considered bad form in Germany (considered a trait of people who've got nothing else to show).

*taught to be bad form. You know why[1]. Which only made Germany the hidden champion of hidden champion companies.

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoLIU2NI66w

Re: The long lost manual for the Zuse Z4 has been found

#52
post #10

There's a very lively startup scene in Berlin, but no-one in that scene seems to know that the world's first digital computer was built in Berlin. There's an obscure and easy to miss sign ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse#/media/File:2007-0... ) on the house he lived in while working on it, and another sign at the technical university, but that's about it. No big festivities in his name, no commemorations,…

I think that's because he didn't have a lasting impact for Berlin (or Germany) beside being the first.

Zuse built the first computers in Berlin, but they were only used in the war-time government ministries afaik. After the war, he sold his first computer, which I would consider commercial available, to ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He founded 2 companies, but both were not successful compared to e.g. Intel. He would be really famous and well-known if he had managed to create a computing giant. He never had a university employment, so his papers were not well known compared to Turing and there weren't a lot of them. He even didn't publish his PhD thesis where he invented the first programming language and created an elaborate demo in which he programmed the first chess engine (also afaik). I think in science being the first is overrated and not that important. You have to publish and popularise your idea to really have an impact (schmidhuber would disagree). So his intellectual legacy was merely that he was the first, but not really influential. And his commercial success was also limited.

I think it's tragic, it was an enormous wasted potential for germany. It might be that he never was the great entrepreneur with the skills to build a tech-giant, but he was undoubtedly a genius who invented the future. He could have an enormous impact if he were equipped with a big lab and funding, if he would have taken the academic route. But Germany wasn't (and is still not) able to support geniuses that don't complete the usual strict path to professorship (study -> phd -> habilitation/post-doc).

Re: The long lost manual for the Zuse Z4 has been found

#53
post #10

There's a very lively startup scene in Berlin, but no-one in that scene seems to know that the world's first digital computer was built in Berlin. There's an obscure and easy to miss sign ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse#/media/File:2007-0... ) on the house he lived in while working on it, and another sign at the technical university, but that's about it. No big festivities in his name, no commemorations,…

The Deutsches Technikmuseum commemorates his contributions too. It was one of the things I marveled at in that geek paradise of a museum. Because otherwise the only time I ever heard of Zuse is in a few paragraphs in the cursory and customary "History of Programming Languages" that opened my PL class at uni. (Claims below are completely opinions , very unsubstantiated, yours might vary, doesn't matter, just my musing…

I suspect counting on your fingers predates the abacus. Granted, the abacus is much more powerful, and it is crafted instead of naturally occurring, but the principle of operation seems very similar.

Re: The long lost manual for the Zuse Z4 has been found

#54
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proof that the Z3 is turing complete is pretty funny: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945455 http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/ag-ki/rojas_home/documents/...

I knew that there was a proof, but never read the paper before. Now that I did, I think that proof is garbage tbh. For Turing completeness, a fixed, constant-sized program needs to be able to handle arbitrary inputs and use arbitrary amounts of memory. It's important to distinguish the model from the implementation here. Theoretically, a language like Python is Turing complete. (And BTW you don't need infinite precis…

Z4/ETH-Edition has conditional jumps, which makes it much less contentious.

Re: The long lost manual for the Zuse Z4 has been found

#55
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people i know in Berlin know that one of the first mechanical calculators is in the technical museum Berlin, but those people don’t know about concepts like turing-equivalent, so they call it a Computer. Many great inventions have a nationalist folklore surrounding it, often ascribing a development to some national hero, while ignoring the process of development as a whole or parallel developments in other count…

The proof that the Z3 is turing complete is pretty funny: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945455 http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/ag-ki/rojas_home/documents/...

Historians say: the "argument that Konrad Zuse's 1943 Z3 computer was universal was an impressive party trick, but diverged entirely from the way the machine was designed, how it was actually used, or indeed from anything that would have made sense in the 1940s... To us, the real lesson of his analysis is that the Z3 could have been Turing complete with only minor design changes, but that it wasn't because the concept and its benefits were not yet widely understood."

I agree with that analysis and think Turing-completeness is overrated.

Re: The long lost manual for the Zuse Z4 has been found

#56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boasting about national achievements is considered bad form in Germany (considered a trait of people who've got nothing else to show).

*taught to be bad form. You know why[1]. Which only made Germany the hidden champion of hidden champion companies. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoLIU2NI66w

I do not understand your comment and I am doubly confused after watching the linked video.

Re: The long lost manual for the Zuse Z4 has been found

#57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*taught to be bad form. You know why[1]. Which only made Germany the hidden champion of hidden champion companies. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoLIU2NI66w

I do not understand your comment and I am doubly confused after watching the linked video.

Just because Germans are taught not to be proud of their history using the above method (perfectly sound argument), doesn't mean they aren't. It's just more quiet and subtle.

Apologies for the confusing video, but you're watching a master of dark humor.

Re: The long lost manual for the Zuse Z4 has been found

#59
post #10

There's a very lively startup scene in Berlin, but no-one in that scene seems to know that the world's first digital computer was built in Berlin. There's an obscure and easy to miss sign ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse#/media/File:2007-0... ) on the house he lived in while working on it, and another sign at the technical university, but that's about it. No big festivities in his name, no commemorations,…

There are some cool Zuze computers and reconstructions at the Deutches Technik museum. Z1 is a marvel. Well worth a visit: https://technikmuseum.berlin/ausstellungen/dauerausstellunge...
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