Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding • Hacker News Board

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#21

Post by fooker » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 6:02 PM UTC

ds_opseeker wrote: post #19

fooker wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed some important points that explain why he's not celebrated. His efforts received enormous amounts of funding from the Nazis. Much of his specialized 'computers' were explicitly for the war effort, including planes. He was a big fan of utilizing computing for racial and genealogy research. The Nazis had plans drawn out to murder orders of magnitude more people based on this sort of research had they won (Ge…

Initially received funding, later in the war they turned it off as "not war worthy" You might be surprised how many UK and US scientists of that time supported eugenics, see for example https://nautil.us/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics-238014 and as for computers and atrocities, see IBM's history from the time or perhaps some more recent tech companies. Few of us are saints.

You'll find that the computing pioneers we celebrate by name are largely detached from the examples you mentioned.

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#22

Post by Tomte » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 6:05 PM UTC

pmkary wrote: post #16

It’s sad to see how the American propaganda destroyed the true genius of computation, to a point that there is not even a museum for his work. Imagine doing the work of many, and many years before them, and then getting here.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad-Zuse-Museum_H%C3%BCnfel...

Apart from a quite a few museums having his machines (or replicas).

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#23

Post by Teever » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 6:05 PM UTC

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #2

Zuse is probably the most under-appreciated thinker of the 20th century. Everybody's heard of Claude Shannon, von Neumann, Feynman, and all the rest of 'em, but Zuse's enormous contributions have received rather little attention. To summarize a couple of the highlights: In 1936 Germany, Konrad Zuse began developing the Z1, a mechanical calculating machine programmed via perforated 35mm film. By 1937, he had broadened…

Konrad Zuse also seems to have been a pioneer in the concept of self-replication and self assembly.

Check out this cool crank-powered self-assembling tower thing that he made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odwgpKRnWM8&t=1s

And his work on self replication: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxv4vDMOFCo

I know very little about Zuse or his work and I lament that this museum is closing down as I am moving to Europe next year and had intended to use the opportunity to research his work.

Neil Gershenfeld has a quip that "computer science is the worst thing to happen to both computers and science because it prematurely froze the model of computation around 1950s designs' and I think there's some truth to this. The resource limitations that Zuse experienced in Germany during the depression and war that forced him down a design path of mechanical design over electromechanical and exposed him to the more fundamental idea that computation is ultimately a physical process -- 'there's no such thing as software just different states of hardware'. I have a feeling that the next big technological revolution will be based around self-replicating machines that more fully unify computation with matter.

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#24

Post by inglor_cz » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

The problem was probably in the location. Hoyerswerda is a place which does not attract visitors, even the locals left in droves (isn't it the German record holder when it comes to cities losing population?)

In Dresden, Leipzig or Berlin, 30.000 visitors a year could have been reached.

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#25

Post by throw234259 » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

ds_opseeker wrote: post #19

fooker wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed some important points that explain why he's not celebrated. His efforts received enormous amounts of funding from the Nazis. Much of his specialized 'computers' were explicitly for the war effort, including planes. He was a big fan of utilizing computing for racial and genealogy research. The Nazis had plans drawn out to murder orders of magnitude more people based on this sort of research had they won (Ge…

Initially received funding, later in the war they turned it off as "not war worthy" You might be surprised how many UK and US scientists of that time supported eugenics, see for example https://nautil.us/how-eugenics-shaped-statistics-238014 and as for computers and atrocities, see IBM's history from the time or perhaps some more recent tech companies. Few of us are saints.

[flagged]

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#26

Post by kens » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #2

Zuse is probably the most under-appreciated thinker of the 20th century. Everybody's heard of Claude Shannon, von Neumann, Feynman, and all the rest of 'em, but Zuse's enormous contributions have received rather little attention. To summarize a couple of the highlights: In 1936 Germany, Konrad Zuse began developing the Z1, a mechanical calculating machine programmed via perforated 35mm film. By 1937, he had broadened…

The argument that the Z3 is 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."

Source: ENIAC in Action p255.

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#27

Post by exceptione » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 6:14 PM UTC

Maybe we could replace the link with the mdr.de? Heise.de violates GDPR law by using a "pay for play" model.

I am sorry for the meta comment but websites like these should be on the black list imho (and it escapes me why the german watch dog is sleeping at the wheel so often).

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#28

Post by tgv » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 6:16 PM UTC

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #2

Zuse is probably the most under-appreciated thinker of the 20th century. Everybody's heard of Claude Shannon, von Neumann, Feynman, and all the rest of 'em, but Zuse's enormous contributions have received rather little attention. To summarize a couple of the highlights: In 1936 Germany, Konrad Zuse began developing the Z1, a mechanical calculating machine programmed via perforated 35mm film. By 1937, he had broadened…

> there are no physical observations which contradict Zuse's notion, as he wrote it, of a computable universe.

There is no model capable of simulating the universe either.

I also wonder what such an observation would have to look like. Observations per se are unique and recorded and therefore can be reconstructed via trivial computation. Which brings us to the laws of physics. You may believe that they are utterly wrong and the universe is deterministic after all, but then the burden of proof is upon you.

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#29

Post by wvbdmp » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

Sad, but the reality is, Hoyerswerda is a small town in east east Germany and computer museums are already super niche in general. How many tourists could they possibly get? Maybe the Nixdorf museum in Paderborn can snatch it up. Paderborn is no metropolis either, but at least it’s relatively central and the museum gets 13 times as many yearly visitors.

Re: Konrad Zuse Museum shutting down due to lack of funding

#30

Post by tchalla » Mon, Aug 31, 2026, 6:22 PM UTC

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #2

Zuse is probably the most under-appreciated thinker of the 20th century. Everybody's heard of Claude Shannon, von Neumann, Feynman, and all the rest of 'em, but Zuse's enormous contributions have received rather little attention. To summarize a couple of the highlights: In 1936 Germany, Konrad Zuse began developing the Z1, a mechanical calculating machine programmed via perforated 35mm film. By 1937, he had broadened…

I think Zuse is underrated because he worked pretty much alone. The other names and particularly Von Nuemann were prolific collaborators apart from being very good at what they do. There’s probably a takeaway from how this turned out.