KONRAD ZUSE

Working alone, with financial help from the government, German engineer Konrad Zuse produced the first programmable computer in... 1941? Zuse’s work is often overlooked, but he began work in 1935 after becoming bored with the calculations he had to do by hand in his job at an aircraft factory. In 1936, he produced the Z1, a floating-point binary mechanical calculator with limited programmability, and also submitted some interesting patents. His work was destroyed in an air raid, but in 1939 he was called up for military service, and produced the Z2, an updated Z1 built with telephone relays.

While not a member of the Nazi Party, Zuse’s work benefitted the regime and contributed to its missile programs. He was advised to work with vacuum tubes, but thought the idea “crazy.” More bombing destroyed the Z3, a binary 22-bit floating-point calculator featuring programmability with loops, but the Z4—a 32-bit floatingpoint programmable computer built from mechanical and electromechanical logic—was missed by the bombers.

Post-war, IBM took an option on his patents, providing an income, and by 1950 had delivered the Z4, the only working computer in continental Europe, to a Swiss university. The Z series would go up to Z43; the Z22 was the first computer to use magnetic storage. He submitted a PhD thesis to the University of Augsburg, but forgot to pay, so was rejected. He continued to work on programming languages, large format plotters, and even published a book on the digital structure of the universe. A painter in his spare time, Zuse died in 1995. The Zuse Institute for applied mathematics and computer science in Berlin is named in his honor.