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Was Zuse's Z3 the First Programmable Computer?
Roland Piquepaille writes "Several years before the Colossus in the U.K. and the ENIAC in the U.S., the Z3, built by Konrad Zuse in 1941, was crunching numbers in Germany. In a short article, the Register reports on allegations that the Z3 was the first programmable computer. Based on a binary floating-point number and switching system, it had all the attributes of today's computers, such as a control block, a memory, and a calculator. But it didn't have the ability to store the program in the memory together with the data because the memory was too small. It had a 64-word memory of 22 bits each and was able to handle four additions per second and to do a multiplication in about five seconds. And it was pretty big: five meters long, two meters high, and 80 centimeters wide. It was destroyed during WWII, and later rebuilt in 1960/1961. You'll find more details, pictures and references in this analysis of this ancestor of modern computing. [Additional note: you can find other references to the Z3, Colossus and Eniac computers in this former Slashdot item, posted in October 2000.]"
had the Nazi's decided to devote more resources to it. Though it really wouldn't have helped them win the war.
Pointless flame: not invading Russia, maybe, but..
At least Zuse went to work with the allies instead of the Soviets after the war.
Give it a year and we'll have a US film released about how 'they' designed the first ever computer,... in the stone age.
I find mechanical computers very interesting. I was browsing the web a few days ago and some guy built a differentiator, integrator, and summer based on some pneumatic system. Very cool.
But that one couldn't even play Frogger! Useless!
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. (> <)
ABACUS, my friends
And now we have chips with 5.33 GHz clocks and they are still too slow for some people.
I'm not all that surprised by this, after all as every schoolboy who's played "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" knows, Hitler's merry men came up with staggering advances in technology: Robotics, tesler weaponry, zombies and nubile female assassins in skin-tight leather catsuits. It's amazing that a single American soldier made out of pixels managed to single-handedly wipe out the entire German army really. I wouldn't have known about all of this without access to that game; it seems as though someone has managed to conceal these details about agent Blazkowitz's amazing adventures behind enemy lines until now. I certainly cannot find any mention of it in the library, and the old man in my local pub who's always telling us "youngans" about his own endevours seems very tight lipped/violent when the subject is raised...
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
I'm sure it's just a total coincidence, but hamsters can provide 5.33 - 8 Hz.
math: 40-60 rpm, 8 cycles (16 magnets, alternating poles)/rev.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
Building something like this could be a really cool high school science project.
Evolution or ID?
The ABC Computer at Iowa State University, by John Antasoff and Clifford Berry.
...with more re-writing of history and unsubstantiated claims of glory.
When will they port Net BSD to it?
without a stored program, it is called a calculator, not a computer brother.
The article (and references) note that Zuse's computers stored their programs on old movie film because paper was in short supply.
;-)
Please keep this fact quiet, lest the MPAA has will make inroards to claiming intellectual property rights to the entire modern computer industry
What's the cosmic connection? Does SCO own the rights to Zuse's work? Stay tuned, same bat time, same bat channel!
Which was the first computer? Does it really matter? I mean, honestly, why bicker about minor points in history?
Just say the Z3 was the first german, ENIAC was the first US, etc...
Who cares who was first... what really matters is what we do now and in the future.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
What, was alternating current in Germany REALLY SLOW?!?!? Hmm, if it could do 4 22-bit ops at 5.33 Hz, just replacing the clock with standard US 60Hz current would have given it a blinding (well, in comparison) 45 (rounded down) 22-bit ops.
So I repeat, why the heck did he go with such a slow clock speed?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Can we get those dimensions in something standard, like Libraries of Congress?
-Paul
I wonder if this was smuggled out of Stalag 13 by Dunkirk and modified by the Allies to give us the ENIAC?? Boy, I'll bet General Burkhalter was pissed at Klink!
Hoooooooooooooooooogan!
I also reply below your current threshold.
Babbage's Analytical Engine (which first computer programmer was Ada Byron, daughter of Lord Byron).
I DO happen to think that Zuse should get credit for the first computer. I remember hearing all that historical stuff about who made the first computer. But then I read what Zuse had accomplished and when he did it. His concepts were way ahead of everyone else. He basically invented the programmable computer. No, its not just like the architecture of our computers today, but he certainly laid the foundation - or would have had his research been shared.
The crazy thing is that he developed all his ideas and machines isolated from the rest of the western world due to the Nazis. That to me is even more incredible. Give him a trophy.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
I can stand an offtopic so-
NO. We've had lots of idiots propped up by others in this country- though this might be the first one who wasn't a war hero.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
And if properly prepared, at least two good meals.
Unless you believe the steam engine was invented
by Watt or the electric bulb by Edison. If you believed so, you might be supprised that not the one inventing can attach the name, but the first
one making profit from it.
Relays.
Incidentally, Aiken was the one who predicted that only six electronic digital computers would be required to satisfy the computing needs of the US.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those! Hey, somebody had to say it. They always do.
"False hope is why we'll never run out of natural resources!" - Lewis Black
Colossus was the first totally electronic computing device. Props to the Germans for the first ever electro/mechanical...
Seriously, pretty cool stuff. I think this weekend I'll build a computer from old buick starter solenoids, and serpintine belts.
Why worry? Each of us is wearing an unlicensed "nucular" accelerator on his back.
Sig changed for readability by G.W.
Ok, maybe the exact fact or date does not matter much, but knowing what lead them to build that computer, why they were doing it, etc is kind of important for history.
As long as history matter, I think we should care...
Or at least the plans for the Z1 did. IIRC he tried to get it built, but the engineers thought he was a conman. He eventually got it completed in 1938.
The next model, the Z2 was partly finished before Zuse got conscripted into the army, obviously they were oblivious as to the importance of his developments.
Incidentally, it's important to point out that although the Z3 had government money behind it, it was built and used by Zuse personally at home to solve problems with wing flutter for Heinkel where he worked. It was destroyed by chance when his home was hit in a bombing raid.
Zuse also developed the first multi-purpose computing language 'Plankalkul' too. Quite an impressive achievement for a mathematician who developed a computer simply to enable him to do his wing calculations more effectively.
What Turing thought of the Z3. I though - and please correct me if I'm wrong here - that a computer in the Turing sense required a kind of memory in which to store the instructions that are to be used on the arbitrary dataset. The point being that the instructions in the program determine the actions of the machine so it is not limited to a single trick, such as an abacus. So, if a calculating machine is instructed through punch cards and is restricted to the operations that are made possible by its hardware and indicated by the punch cards, is it really a computer in that sense? It is programmable in a way, so in that sense it is, I guess. It's arguing fine points, but I am really curious as to what better informed /. members think about this.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
Greetings,
;)
who ever invented the first computer - its a question of national identity. The U.S. one was earlier, but used decimal numbers and didn't seperate ram from the logical unit (I wouldn't call it CPU).
Btw. The z3 was not the first computer. The first was the z1 but it didn't run at all.
Anyway, Zuse built it in it room. Thus it was the first (modern) computer-startup ever
Keep smiling
yanosz
Given that the machine could not store its program as well as the data I would say no, but it's a nice try for the number one spot. The German machine is also IMHO a better machine than ENIAC as ENIAC had to be reprogrammed by almost completely rebuilding the machine.
Sorry folks, but the first true computer was (and still is) the Manchester University Mark 1.
Ed Almos
Budapest, Hungary
The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws. - Tacitus, 56-120 A.D.
Too bad this bad-boy's not around anymore, I'd give anything to see the Linux port.
Someone have a link somewhere with a good overview of this sort of computing that puts it in context with what little us young folks know about modern computers? For instance, just what is a floating point processor, and how is it implemented both on silicon and with relays? How was this thing programmed? How does one go from a bunch of relays to a command console using purely mechanical methods? How did the film I/O work? And so on.
The Z machines and their inventor are also mentioned in a beautiful book, most suitable for geek coffee tables everywhere - "Computers: An Illustrated History" (direct Amazon UK link).
A suitable Father's day present if he's a geek too?
This is not a sig
It seems to me that the Z2, or perhaps even the Z1 may have predated it.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
What other sources can reliably confirm that this device actually existed when he claims it did?
I mean, even if his notes date to that time, that doesn't prove that it was actually built back then. Babbage had a design for a computing machine long before that, but he couldn't actually build it because manufacturing technologies weren't that good yet.
So, again... what _INDEPENDANT_ source can verify that this guy is telling the truth about actually having it built when he said it was?
I don't want to knock this guy's achievement into the ground if he really did do it, but to go around saying long after the fact "Oh, I did that first, and here's my notes to prove it" doesn't quite cut it, in my opinion.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
What'd be more interesting, however, would be to compare the ways these guys took to get there. Whether the function of the machine made any difference, etc.
Who cares who was first... what really matters is what we do now and in the future.
More importantly, where have all the trolls gone?
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
David Bradley's quote seems oddly relevant now:
"I may have invented [ctrl-alt-delete], but Bill made it famous"
Imagine. In a not-too-far-away future, some human beings are going to land on, say, Mars. And they will want to stay for a certain time.
Imagine. There is dissension in the group, and instead of returning to Mother Earth, at least part of the group wants to stay "for ever". One day, their computer is going to break down, e.g. by wear caused by cosmic radiation.
Even if they survive, even if the human colony on that far-away planet is large, even if they have nanotech with them, it will still be far beyond their means to build a chip-producing plant. If they want to solve numerical problems, they'll have to build, one day, a computer with parts from the space craft they came with.
Granted, it sounds improbable. But still - this is what knowing your computing science archeology is good for.
History is important
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I just had a look through, and I couldn't find anyone else to point this out, which suggests I'm wrong, but:
Based on a binary floating-point number
Wasn't Floating Point invented by Intel?
- Jax
Well, call me old-fashioned, but I really like my computer to be programmable. After all, I am a Registered Computer Programmer.
See http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Programme/Simulation en/Z3_Sim/simulation.html
By signing your name to your post, you have lost more credibility than you attempted to gain.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
We all know Al Gore invented the 1st computer.
http://www.epemag.com/zuse/default.htm#index It has the whole story of all the Zx computers from Z1 to when Zuse left the company in 1969. The story is told by Zuse's son and it is in English. Let /. begin
see Zuse article on Wikipedia.
People, I'm disgusted with the little knowledge of history slashdotters show. Every one here should know that the first computer was created by Spock with silver forks when he and Captain Kirk traveled to the past and the tricorder failed. Is this news for nerds or what?
"I think this line is mostly filler"
Based on a binary floating-point number and switching system, it had all the attributes of today's computers, such as a control block, a memory, and a calculator. But it didn't have the ability to store the program in the memory together with the data because the memory was too small.
Modern computers don't necessarily have the program memory in the same space as the data memory. Machines using the Von Neumann architechture, such as a PC have a shared memory space. The newer Harvard architechture has separate program and data spaces.
There are many advantages to separating them. The main one is that you can concurrently fetch the data for the current instruction and the next instruction word from the two separate memory busses, effectively doubling your throughput. Also, you're going to want your memory to be a multiple of 8 bits wide, but there is no reason your instruction word should have this restriction.
Jason
ProfQuotes
It must have been the Americans who saved the day.
See this comment, the submitter is a known BLOG spammer
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=109491&cid=92
he steals other sites content in order to get advertising impressions, call it what it is SPAM
yes, it probably was the first proper computer, although the debate is fairly pointless.
no taxation without representation!
If I had posted this, I have no doubt in my mind I would have got -1, Troll for it.
I'm not saying you deserve a troll moderation, just that I don't deserve troll, and that some moderators really get on my fucking tits.
Go ahead you fucking losers, troll me. I don't even give a shit, if that's how you wanna get kicks throughout your geeky, virgin, hermit lives then by all means, feel free. Just don't go crying when it happens to you, and it WILL happen to you, and it WILL be more painful, cos you'll care more than me.
...Russian computer - All made in Taiwan!
I grew up in the US and have lived in Germany for nearly twenty years, and this is a story that has always amused me. It's a bit like the Americans and Soviets both insisting that they invented airplanes. In America I had always heard that ENIAC was the first computer, but almost as soon as I got here, I learned that the Germans simply take it for granted that Konrad Zuse invented the computer. Well, the geeks all do, or so it seems (your average German on the street probably has no clue, although quite a few of them have heard the story as well).
I imagine that the very idea that there's a controversy is bewildering on both sides, since both Americans and Germans have been told all their lives that their side was first.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
Roland Piquepaille is a BLOG Spammer
steals content from other peoples websites, you think he has permission to take those images and content and put them on his blog ? perhaps because he thinks site owners wont come after himbecause its a blog ?
i mean you could at least use your own stories and content, but then that would mean WORKING for a living
Roland Piquepaille steals content and then reposts it to sell advertising on his blog
don't belive me ? see this +5 comment and call him out as the spammer that he is, you think email is the only spam ?
Roland is not a new thing but he is still fooling slashdot with his stolen content and images, you think he has permission ? he must be a desperate man to steal other peoples IP
When will they port Net BSD to it?
Actually, SuSe should be coming out with a port next quarter.
So the Zuse corporation can sell more Z3's.
By the way it must run Java programs because Java is "a computer language that allows programs to run on any computer".
a lot of the accepted inventors of one thing or another had their competitors/rivals even if they didnt know about them at the time.
this z3 is definately worthy of historical note. its probably a 'computer' before colossus. the genius of colossus was that it was built for a purpose.. cracking the enigma codes.. and the genius behind that was the people working out WHAT TO PUT IN IT. so i dont think the colossus story needs to worry about having its thunder stolen by this german dude, although it probably needs to worry a lot about having its "first computer" claim stolen.
uggh i hate spam dressed as an "article"
I don't quite see the point of spending thousands of dollars on a machine that takes five seconds to do a multiplication, surely it'd be faster to do it on paper or in your head?
Have you metaroderated recently?
In order to have WWII, you needed an insane regime to start it. Expecting an insane regime to then suddenly behave logically once the war is underway is pretty silly.
paintball
Anyone realized that the Zuse-Logo remarkably resembles that of Zope ?
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Let the generals run the combat. AFAIK there were several opportunities to either retreat and regroup or to give up ground to assist other units that could have actually won the Eastern Front.
Lets see, a country the size of Texas with little more than twice the population with limited natural resources such as petroleum, was able to fight the WHOLE WORLD for six years. They even lasted nearly a whole year when most of their major cities had been reduced to rubble, inflicting massive civilian casualities the likes of which were unknown in the rest of Western Europe. What would have happened if the moment Britain and France declared war on Germany for reclaiming their lost territory they just gassed London and Paris, and killed everyone there. Or maybe Moscow.
Remember, Germany was able to successfully fight for those six years WITHOUT resorting to massive targetting of civilian population centers.
There were a lot of resources wasted on the Death Camps and other essentially political/sociological obsessions.
What kind of resources? The singular greatest argument against the existence of those death camps as you put is fuel. The only reason fuel is said to have been used was to creamate the victims since mass graves hold 200,000-300,000 dead at the most. The problem is these same people claim the holocaust didn't happen until 1943, AFTER Stalingrad when the fuel shortage was become quite critical. It simply doesn't make sense.
Not only did this limit Nazi Germany's resources, but it limited their access to a large segment of educated people.
What sort of educated people? You mean the Jews? You mean 1-2% of Germany's population? most of whom were forced to emigrate before the war began? I would hardly call that a large segment, and even without them they developed practically every modern weapon of war which even today stands as the founding model. Israel seems to get along today just fine without the help of the 100 million muslims in their neighborhood. When you are pursuing an ethnic state you have to make some sacrifices. Germany made them, and Israel makes them today.
Germany's problem was not lack of educated people, it was lack of workers and lack of soldiers.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
It's a general purpose programmable computer, whether it can execute from storage memory or not is totally irrelevant.
Only thing that kinda sucks on the PIC 16F series what with separate code/data is reading ROM lookup tables... 16F87x has a special set of registers you can setup to read from FLASH, plus there's other tricks, but it's certainly a very useful non von-neumann CPU nontheless.
"5.33 Hz ought to be a fast enough clock speed for anybody"
Cool article, I have always been fascinated by very old computers and just how much work the could really do.
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
After the War a team of U.K. investigators found Zuse in Bavaria & interrogated him. They saw his "Z4" machine there (not in working order) and concluded that he had nothing of interest to offer them. Or as Frank Zappa used to say, "no commercial potential." Now this article appears in a U.K. publication!
First let's start with ENIAC. ENIAC used valves, was electronic, was Turing Complete, and was designed to be Turing Complete. Which means that it could, theoretically, solve any problem currently solvable by today's machines (given enough time). Because it was Turing complete, it was obviously programmable.
The Z3 used mechanical relays instead. If I recall right, the Z3 could be Turing Complete with a little hack. In 1998, if I remember right, someone showed that conditional jumps could be implemented by quite literally forking the punched tape that was fed into it. So the Z3 was Turing complete, but wasn't quite designed to be. It was, however, quite programmable.
Collosus wasn't Turning Complete, but it was damn fast for what it did. It was programmable, and used valves like ENIAC later did.
Thus, the Z3 was the first Turing Complete (sort of) programmable computer ever made.
Collosus was the first fully electronic, programmable computer. It was also the first programmable computer used to break encryption.
ENIAC was the first computer designed to be Turing Complete.
Strongest contender to the title of the first "real" computer is, in my opinion, the Z3.
no taxation without representation!
Tell that to the H1-Bs and resident aliens.
Da Blog
Granted, it sounds improbable. But still - this is what knowing your computing science archeology is good for.
Not really. I think a more plausible scenario would include some sort of extreme modding of one of the astronaut's iPods. The scenario you described can justify much better the good ol' "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these" or "Yes, but can it run Linux/*BSD" slashdotisms rather than computing archeology. The point is that in contemporary world we are surrounded by partially defunct, morally obsolete or just battered computer junk that can be used as a source for a new machine. My old Amiga 1200 or my old Playstation 1 that I no longer use (but keep them just for sake of nostalgia) have much much more number crunching horsepower than all the computers of the Eniac/Colossus/Zuse age. Hell, they are more powerful than the on-board computer that landed Apollo on the Moon. So in the scenarios like you describe, people would rather scavenge for digital junk just in their bedrooms (or even pockets), and quickly find some powerful enough chips (in their toasters or anything).
And then - yes - one of the astronauts could proudly say. "See, years ago I was participating in a Slashdot discussion on how to turn Graphite Apple Airport Base Station into an embedded Linux-based fuel-cell powered Nethack game console. You laughed that I must be crazy - who's laughing now?".
Da Blog
Although, as stated, reliability was quite good, I nevertheless remember many hours of searching for mistakes, which often had their roots in the malfunction of relay contacts due to dust. We also discovered several cold soldering joints that gradually failed to conduct; finding them was particularly bothersome, because they caused mistakes that were often intermittent. On two occasions I had to disassemble parts of the memory. This meant removing about 1000 pins and placing them back again. There were two kinds of pins, their lengths were 2.5 and 2.6 mm. If due to a mistake I mixed up one single pin, the entire memory was blocked, a very frustrating experience.
I don't think so. Hitler made some bad decisions, more than the pros would have made, but he wasn't as stupid militarily as people would like to think.
If you read about Soviet production statistics, it is hard to imagine them losing against Germany, short of Germany going nuclear.
The only reason the Soviets did so badly in the begining was because Stalin was stupid enough to kill all his decent officers. Once he stopped doing that, and let the surviving good ones emerge, then the odds were all on Russias side.
Even if D-Day hadn't happened the Soviets wouldd have overrun Germany eventually. D-Day's essential effect was to keep West-Germany (and Western Europe) away from the Soviets.
After all, the Soviets were 3-4 times bigger than Germany, and were only fighting on one front (and Germany had 3-4 other fronts to worry about).
The colossus is interesting in a few respects.
The first being that it was somewhat, but not completely programmable. It was well suited for cracking german ciphers, and could be modified to account for changes in the encryption schemes.
The second was that it was fast. Very fast. Granted, it suffered from a von neumann bottleneck. The computers typically operated at 1,000 charatcters per second. One of the designers tested the limits of the machine and found that it could reliably work up to 8,000 characters per second before the paper tape would catch fire from the friction. This sort of speed went unsurpassed for decades -- perhaps even into the 80s.
Thirdly, it was small. Tiny compared to ENIAC. All 10 fit into one (albeit, rather large) room.
Last, it had almost no influence upon later computers. After the war, Churchill ordered the cryptologists to cut the machine into "pieces no bigger than a man's head". However, as all government secrets go, it wasn't held quite well, and someone successfully builttheir own colossus.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
In this day and age, calling someone "Hitler" or a "Nazi" is the single biggest intellectual copout. The other person automatically wins the debate by default simply due to your lameness.
The fact MoveOn.org thought it was their best commercial says a lot about that group's thinking. Today, being part of a political group is like being part of a religion, and it's not about being truthful but about being "right" and being able to say "I told you so, you liberals/warhawks." Equating Bush to Hitler is lowest-common-denominator thinking that only preaches to the choir.
"Sufferin' succotash."
They hounded Einstein out of the country because he was born Jewish, decrying his "Jewish Intellectualism".
That lost them the nuke race.
5 flops, damn! Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.
And now, on a related note, I'm going to go use some pr0n and think of the hot Barbara Bush, Sr.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If you are interesred in Plankalkül, check this out. You can even play the chess game ;-)
Also, there are a lot more resources linked there, including pics of the remains of the original machines an some rebuilds. Main page is here
at Cambridge we were all taught that EDSAC was the first real computer - because Cambridge invented it! Hardly a mention of anything else.
Why is that every time anyone in the world comes out with something the Germans claim to have done it first?
Newton comes out with calculus, here comes Leibniz.
Yeager breaks the sound barrier, Germans claim that they do it all the time in their Me 262.
Darwin writes the "Origin of Species", the Germans call it a rip off of Mendel (and Haeckel and Chamberlain and add to it and republish).
I could think of more if I thought about it for a while.
I'm not trying to say that the Germans aren't great inventors, engineers, scientists or anything else, it just seems like they always say after the fact, "Oh yeah, we invented that too."
and there is a Z4 now
unsig
They don't want it to suddenly start dying too!
After that pointless "what if" debate is over some of you might be interested to know that there is a functional replica of the Z3 in the "Deutsches Museum" in Munich. It's quite cool to listen to the 5Hz Clock and "hear" it calculate. See http://www.deutsches-museum.de/ausstell/dauer/info rm/infor3.htm at the bottom of the page (it's in German, sorry).
Pictures of the Z1
Or some of his scanned notes, or other stuff, linked here at the site of the Zuse Institute
This is actually a very important event in the development of computers. The technology was now out in the open. Anyone who so desired could develop a computer without paying any fees. Had that patent not been thrown out the computer landscape might be very different today.
Some information about Atanasoff and ABC is available here.
The fact MoveOn.org thought it was their best commercial says a lot about that group's thinking.
So, apparently, it says a lot about very little.
Interesting and signifcant though they were, neither the Colossus, or Harvard Mark I had this ability. The Z3, as it turned out, did - though this was only proved in 1998, and was a "theoretical" proof - you could use the Z3 as a universal computer, but it wasn't really practical to use it in that way.
The ENIAC, however, ugly hack that it was, was designed and used as a Turing-complete computer.
The first computer with a stored-program architecture of the kind virtually all computers use today was the Manchester Baby, based on the EDVAC (?) design if I recall correctly.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
The first recorded programmable computer systems I am aware of that had control structures (loop count) were loom machines which while never used von-neumann style (humans punched the instructions the machine didnt weave new tapes) had the basics we consider today although very ad-hoc since they were built for real work rather than by computability theorists.
Selecting a "first" is extremely hard. If your definition is turing completeness then speech is turning complete so people probably win (although I'll leave turning completeness of animal brains to someone who knows more about the field 8)).
Personally I think that like a lot of other things in the universe there isn't a first because it evolved step by step.
Alan
According to the Smithsonian, U.S. Patent Office, U.S. Courts and many others, the honor goes to John Victor Atanasoff
What's past is NOT ALWAYS prologue for the future!
It's called GIGO.
"You are only young once, but you can be immature forever." -www.animemusicvideos.org
...programmable either, because it could only store about twenty program steps.
Those twenty program steps sure seemed handy at the time, though.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The winner of the commercial contest is this clip
There are no Nazis nor Hitler and no words in this clip.
Other clips have been recogniced in other categories.
Don't think you will be able to see anybody equating Bush with Hitler in there either.
One clip in poor test has been sent to the MoveOn.org contest that indeed did compare Bush to Hitler. Moveon.org did clearly state that it did not endorse this clip
The fact that you think that MoveOn.org believed this clip to be the best of their commercials says a lot about America's media.
As a German I find this comment rather tastless.
It makes the German WW2 efforts almost sound nobel for not "resorting to massive targetting of civilian population centers". So why exactly did my country shoot and V2 and V1 towards London?
The only reason that Germany did not use poison gas was because of the paranoia over this weapon that Hitler developed when serving in WW1. I am quite certain he would have embraced nukes with glee if somebody would have given them to him.
And what is this BS about most Jews having emmigrated? The once that were able to leave the country were a lucky few. To give the impression that most jewish Germans were able to escape the Holocaust is simply a lie and a disgrace.
Rather than see if there is a valid point to what's being said, you just sweep it all aside by invoking some lame variant of Godwin's Law (which is another excuse for intellectual laziness). I imagine you're the same kind of person who would say that Michael Moore's works are garbage, "just because someone on FOX News said so".
How this kind of drivel can be modded insightful is beyond me.
Years ago Donald Knuth (at least I think it was Knuth) wrote an interesting article about Zuse's programming language, called Plankalkul. Apparently it surpassed the features of Fortran, and incorporated things that didn't appear in programming languages until the advent of Algol 60. Really remarkable. Good thing Hitler was too dumb to put a significant development effort behind Zuse's work.
It wasn't just any old electronics. Vacuum tubes are more electronic than transistors, yet if we had stuck with them, we'd never have had tiny packages. Vacuum tubes were just a step between relays and transistors. In the future, when current packaging is going to be considered ancient quaint tech, they won't see much difference between relays and vacuum tubes. They are both size limited, very much a physically expensive to build technology compared to transistors, and certainly not very reliable.
Infuriate left and right
So why exactly did my country shoot and V2 and V1 towards London?
Have you ever been to London? Does it look like there was ever a war there? Now take a vacation to Dusseldorf, oer Berlin, or Dresden. Countless German cities were obliterated, while London appears like it did a century ago. Paris doesn't seem to have experienced any war since 1871.
The only reason that Germany did not use poison gas was because of the paranoia over this weapon that Hitler developed when serving in WW1.
Perhaps, but given how much advanced gas was produced, like sarin, you would think a reasonable person, upon hearing of the attrocities committed by the Russian army as they advanced through East Prussia would make you give up that resolve. I mean, you are already about to lose right? But it doesn't matter really, its a hypothetical. Germany didn't take the war to the next level, that of destroying the cultural centers of western europe because his goal was to save Europe, not destroy it.
And what is this BS about most Jews having emmigrated? The once that were able to leave the country were a lucky few
This is what they teach you in Germany these days eh? My god, whole neighborhoods in the US were populated by Jewish refugees. I personally have met more than a few who left the country prior to the war. Not a week goes by we don't hear of some Jew who had their property confiscated trying to sue to get it back. They give speeches at universities all over the country on a regular basis. Hundreds of thousands left, even according to Jewish sources. They even claim 20,000+ went to Shanghai in China!
These are the facts as reported by Jews themselves.
To give the impression that most jewish Germans were able to escape the Holocaust is simply a lie and a disgrace.
So, what were all those Jews doing from the time Hitler was elected in 1933 until the holocaust supposedly happened in 1943? Being worked to death? For a decade?
I don't read or respond to AC posts
A good novel by Bruce Sterling called The Difference Engine. A 'what if' story, had his computer been built.
The binary computer was invented in 1937 by
John Atanasoff of the University of Iowa, and it
was from this binary stored program design that
John Mauchly derived many of his significant
contributions to the design of Eniac.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Nothing makes them move fast quite like a threat to their claim of "Fristies!" to something, especially if it's technological. We never hear the end of the shrill "COLOSSUS WAS BEFORE ENIAC!" screeches, yet they are remarkably reticent on the whole Zuse issue.
Interesting that in the space of a few years, computing performance went from 5 operations per second for the German device... to about 2 million binary operations per second for the Colossus...
And then the world went back to a sleepy couple of hundred operations per second after the end of the war when all the Colossi were safely melted down for scrap metal and the designs were carefully locked away in nice wood filing cabinets which were then carefully set on fire.
Probably safe to say that the Colossus may not be the first computer (were mechanical looms a kind of programmable computer to put patterns into fabrics?)... but it certainly was the first supercomputer.
-- The universe began. Life started on a billion worlds...
-- Except on one where stupidity was there first.
Yes, it clearly was because it was the very first Turing-complete machine. Turing-completeness should be the one and only criterion used to determine which computer was first. One might make the argument that Babbage's Analytic Engine was the first, but it was never actually built.
A problem we are striking here is that for many words that we take to be pretty simple and obvious, like computer, have several broad meanings depending on what sort of person you are talking to. If you asked my mother-in-law, who honestly has difficulty changing the channel on the TV, what a computer was, I'm sure the standard response would roughly describe the device that I'm writing this post on. To most people, IMO, the everyday sense of computer is the one that would come to mind first.
However, as specialists (i.e. geeks), we are trying to draw a finer distinction and be more accurate with our use of the term. This meaning is then subdivided again depending on whether you are talking about embedded chips in DVD players or about AI and natural language processing with a linguist.
I just don't think it is realistic or possible to claim that there is just one sense of computer and that everything can then be sorted depending on some arbitrary parameters...
Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.
-- Terry Pratchett, Hogfather
Suse's S3
Suse's S3. There was a misunderstanding on a telephone call.
..did it run ZuSE linux?
I just returned from a vacation to Berlin. While there, I spent a day in the Technical Museum (Berliner Technisches Museum), in which they had several if not all of Zuse's machines. Not cardboard recreations - actual, original machines with all/most of the hardware intact. This includes the recreation of his very first mechanical design.
As a side note, he and his colleagues apparently cut the flat aluminum plates that make up the memory core and processor by hand with a little saw. When you see the device, you will understand that this feat alone is worthy of attention.
You should go see the exhibits if you have a chance. According to the museum, Zuse IS the inventor of the computer - no mention of ENIAC et al.. They also go to great pains to point out that the German government (read - stupidly) provided no financial support for any of his endeavors. They also claim that his eventual demise was a ruling against him in favor of IBM on patent issues.
For the curious, Zuse in German is pronounced like 'susa' with a t at the beginning. The 'u' is like the 'oo' in choose. 'Tsoosa' not 'Zeus'.
The father of modern computers, the funny thing is that a patent on his machines in post war germany was denied. Another thing was that he did not invent this machine for war purposes (I dont think Zuse was a Nazi) he just was so fed up with construction calculation that he built his own calculation machine after his needs and thus invented the programmable computer. IBM back then used its influence in post war germany so that Zuse never got patents on its machine. His company which he founded upon his inventions probably would never had go cease to exist in the sixties if he would have been granted the patents which IBM grabbed. Another typical case of an inventor who basically was a genious but was ripped off by a major corporation by the misusage of the patent system. Another thing he also invented one of the first programming languages, in existence Plankalkuel. And after the war he founded his own company which produced computers, it ceased to exist in the mid sixties, when IBM took over the market with almost total control.
I'm suprised that this is news with the slashdot crowd. Konrad Zuses Z3 was the first truely turing complete device in history (the first 'real' computer). Curiously, it was actually a mostly mechanical device. Only the rebuilds use electricity to a larger extent.
Yet the most significant invention to me is not the computer (as the concept has been around almost for centuries) but the microcircuit, imho. Making the world first microcomputer an invention actually worth talking about.
BTW: Who built the first commercial microcomputer? Was that IBM? Unisys? Or what?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Not to mention, that Zuse also developed the first high-level programming language, called Plankalkuel.
Too bad. But the USA destroyed the Z3 and many other cultural objects in germany. Like the USA destroyed many cultural objects in Irak.
But if you come to europe, take a stop in Munich and visit the "Deutsches Museum" and take a stop in Berlin. In Berlin there is even an orginal Zuse computer (I don't know which Zx it is).
And one benefit if you visit europe: No photos are taken from you on the border line, and no fingerprints are taken!
Enjoy the freedom in europe!
.. the BBC Model B was the first computer! :)
Zuse Linux, obviously.... (sorry)
I was not only thinking of purely hardware issues when I wrote this. I was also thinking of the mental attitude, one that we are soon going to lose btw, needed to "scavenge for digital junk just in their bedrooms (or even pockets)" as you express it so coloredly. Zuse had this attitude. One that you still need in order to, say, make a grape of ipods control an improvised oxygen plant. But, true enough: in such a scenario chips will be everywhere.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
As apposed to what, a Commander in Chief who never even saw active duty? How the fuck can you even begin to critize Kerry for his fighting record when Bush is a fucking pussy who's never even held a rifle in anger? You'd rather have a yellow-bellied draft dodger running the worlds most advanced fighting force?
So what would be your point? Just because someone continues to purpetuate an inacuracy that does not make them correct. The Z3 is demonstratably the first programmable Turing Complete computer. The ABC wasn't even a Universal Turing Machine. How could it possibly be the first Computer?
In this day and age, calling someone "Hitler" or a "Nazi" is the single biggest intellectual copout. The other person automatically wins the debate by default simply due to your lameness.
What are you, some kind of Nazi or something? Is your last name Hitler or something?
Ha, I guess I won that argument.
ENIAC ... was designed to be Turing Complete! (I don't think so)
Have you *seen* ENIAC (or what remains of it - go to UPenn and ask). ENIAC was not only *not* Turing Complete - it wasn't even designed to support branches. They were only discovered by accident by an operator who discovered that by kludging a cable together, the numerical output of a computation could be routed into the control input for the next computation (thus making it conditional - if the output was 0, the next computation was not initiated).
ENIAC did not even have a reusable ALU - the program had to be laid out around the room with the output of each stage of the computation wired into the input to the next stage (each ALU stage was about 3' wide and about 6' high) and they needed a large number of them to do anything useful.
Equating Bush to Hitler is lowest-common-denominator thinking that only preaches to the choir.
You can't equate Bush to Hitler. While both are/were deranged war criminals, Hitler was actually intelligent.
I agree 100% with your view (even though I don't with some of the views above). Open discussion is the key to learning from anything that went wrong, be it a mere mistake, a fault or a horrible crime as the Holocoust.
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
The discussion about Zuse's machines is interesting. Let me point out that there is no "first computer". I edited in 2000 a book with the title "The First Computers" (MIT Press). Note the plural. The book deals with all the machines mentioned in this dicussion, from the ABC, Z3 to the ENIAC and beyond. Each machine had something unique, which would later be integral part of what we now call a computer. The proof that the Z3 is Turing universal was published by me in 1998. The details and papers can be found in our web site www.zib.de/zuse which contains simulations of the machine, the interpreter of Plankalkuel that we wrote, and photographs of our hardware reconstruction of the Z3. Raul Rojas Freie Universität Berlin
You may wish to help out with Wikipedia and update this page, then.