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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.]"
The ABC Computer at Iowa State University, by John Antasoff and Clifford Berry.
without a stored program, it is called a calculator, not a computer brother.
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
because a relay is a mechanical thing with much slower response time then semiconductors, and because there's ALOT of them, well they just run that fast or else they gum up
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.
So, the question is: what brought this up? Why did the Register feel the need to suddenly revisit this topic?
Because Collosus was recently rebuilt. this is often regarded as the first programmable computer. Since the Z3 preceded it, it seems this claim is untrue.
Whenever I read anything about WWII, I just look up and thank God that Hitler was such an insane sociopath. Had he not been, the Nazis would have won the war. Note the lack of "probably" in there--they would have won, period.
Germany could've had nukes before we did, but Hitler ordered the research to stop. Why? Because in 1940, when he was told that the research would be complete by 1945, he said something like "We will have won the war by then," and cancelled the program.
The ME-262 jet fighter was totally shredding Allied air units, bombers and fighters alike. Hitler severly curtailed the production of the 262 nonetheless. Why? Because he was so fanatically obsessed with bombing the hell out of London that he insisted that the 262 be a bomber, a task for which it was not particularly well-suited. Messerschmitt tried and tried to retrofit it, but to no real success.
Then of course there were the TWO failed incursions into Russia, which sucked support away from the Western Front, which allowed the D-Day invasion to succeed.
Hitler was a total wackjob. As you say, had he let the actual military leaders run the war, there would have been no stopping Germany. Fortunately for us all, Hitler was such a megalomaniac that he could not bring himself to relinquish control to anyone, and that was Germany's ultimate downfall.
So I repeat, why the heck did he go with such a slow clock speed?
It did FLOATING POINT.
5.33 Hz was the speed of the first machine (Z1, 1941), which used less than 2000 mechanical relays, whereas ENIAC used 18,000 valve tubes.
So I repeat, not only was the Z1 mechanical because of lacking tube technology, it did FLOATING POINT .
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
Command console? Hahahaha :-)
We're talking switchboards and blinken lights, methinks. Of course, I believe the Collossus/ENIAC et al. had typewriters hacked in somehow, judging by the pictures.
With any of the first computers, I think a "command console" whilst not impossible, would take up almost all of your memory and make it useless for actual work.
I'm under the impression that in those days, the only person using a program also usually happend to be the one who WROTE the program, so they know which register outputs hold which results (and their meanings, and so on).
Film I/O (input only I would imagine) - apparently used old film instead of punch cards because of paper shortage - I believe they used air, like the old "player pianos" that would play by themselves if you loaded them up with scrolls of paper that had holes punched in them.
This is a total guess, but in my mind, it probably would have had a Program Counter (PC) of some sort. Start at zero. Start rolling film. Each "notch" could read the state of whether a hole is punched or not. Set the program bit via the approptraite relay. Increment PC, read next notch, etc. At the end of it, all your relays are set to whatever state each of the holes were for each notch in the film.
Floating Point - a feature not present in early PCs and absent even in today's embedded low-power microcontrollers - is a number storage format that allows easy representation and manipulation of numbers that are either very large or very small, with a fractional component (ie - not integers). Quite necessary for scientific work, otherwise you'd need to waste precious code space and CPU cycles having to make do with whole integer numbers and conversions/operations.
See the wiki entry for "floating point" or this one for "FPU". In the case of the Z3, the article states 1 bit for sign (+/-), 7 bits for exponent (position of the decimal point when using binary) and 14 bits for mantissa (actual value of the number).
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.
Da Blog
And English/American bombers was exactly targetted at military or industrial sites? Germans dropped some first bombs to London accidentaly, English answered with massive bombings targetted to civilians. And English/American bombers dropped more bombs on Dresden than Germans on all England.
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
What sort of educated people? You mean the Jews? You mean 1-2% of Germany's population?
Maybe you should look at specific Jews: Hans Bethe (Alsatian-German Jew), Albert Einstein (German Jew), Enrico Fermi (Italian with Jewish wife), Lise Meitner (Austrian Jew), Leo Szilard (Hungarian Jew working in Germany), Edward Teller (Hungarian Jew working in Germany), and Eugene Wigner (Hungarian Jew working in Germany). Oppenheimer, although not a fugitive, was also Jewish and despised Nazi's for their anti-Semitism and the actrocities in Europe.
Specifically, Szilard, Wigner and Einstein were instrumental in convincing Roosevelt to work on the bomb in the first place. Fermi was directly responsible for the first fission reaction. Teller and Oppenheimer's work directly on the bomb are well known.
Remember, Germany was able to successfully fight for those six years WITHOUT resorting to massive targetting of civilian population centers.
The V-2 was specifically a terror weapon. It was not targetted against weapons production facilities but against civilian population centers in England. The first launch was in June, 1942 and Germany didn't fall until September, 1945, so the Nazi's spent a little over 1/2 of that 6 years targetting civilian population centers.
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?)
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.
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
Have you ever been to London?
Yes. And an aunt of mine lived their during the war. While the actual destruction was not at all as devastating as what Germany had to endure, it was certainly not for lack of trying. My aunt gave a very gripping account of the terror that the V2 evoked. It was a death that you did not see coming since it was the 1st supersonic weapon ever. She told us "if you heard it you knew you were al right this time. But it made you feel vulnerable all the time because you weren't save anywhere in London, and there was nothing anybody could do against it." It was perfect state terrorism.
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.
Ever cared to read an objective biography on Hitler?
Hundreds of thousands left, even according to Jewish sources.
And millions have been killed in the holochost.
By far more than survived
A grand-aunt of mine was married to a Jewish German. His name was Wilhelm - as German a name as you can get at the time. They were both chemist and managed to get away to the US before it was to late, but all of Wilhelm's family perished in the Holocaust. His sister and her husband made it to France just to be arrested the night before trying to make their final get-away by boat. I always admired him for being able to come to Germany without hate.
So, what were all those Jews doing from the time Hitler was elected in 1933 until the holocaust supposedly happened in 1943?
If you would care to educate yourself on the issue you would know that the discrimination against Jewish Germans started very gradually. First the synagogues burned, than they had to wear stars, then they were held in ghettos and then gradually they vanished out of sight. The Nazis were very careful in not advertising what happened to the people in concentration camp. They were "just" supposed to be forced to work, and many in fact were exploited that way. It has been reported that even many inmates of the concentration camps thought it was inconceivable that Germany even as badly tainted by Nazism as it was would simply kill its own citizen. A lot of effort was spend on entertaining this illusion. Making the gas chambers in the camps look as inconspicuous as possible (sometimes a shower head was just a device to release water but sometimes it would release something far more lethal).
You can go to Auschwitz and take a look for yourself at the streamlined manufactory of death. Efficient as a state of the art slaughterhouse. If you compare for instance with how many cattle is slaughtered per year in the US the number of victims becomes absolutly plausible.
The "accident" to which you refer, a flight of Luftwaffe bombers dropping their load on London having strayed off course during the Battle of Britain is true, of course. But the Blitz that followed, as well as the V-Weapons (V-1, V-2), were far from accidental.
And while the USAAF and RAF embraced the aerial part of "Total War", it was Germany that pioneered this tactic, starting in WWI with the shelling of Paris and the aerial attacks on London (via airplane and Zeppelin). This tactic was refined during the Spanish Civil War (c.f., Guernica, an event immortalized by Picasso), which was a dress rehearsal for the Luftwaffe.
In fact, the first bombs that fell on Berlin in WWII were French, dropped from a converted mail plane dubbed the Jules Verne, in May 1940.
Yes, the US and UK dropped tons of ordnance on Germany. But the only thing that kept Nazi Germany from replying in kind was the Luftwaffe's lack of heavy bombers. A prototype of something called the Amerika Bomber was built by Junkers, but Germany lacked the industrial infrastructure to build them in significant numbers. The Luftwaffe's assets were largely medium bombers.
Finally, after the war, the USAAF conducted something called the Strategic Bombing Survey, an assessment of the effectiveness of their heavy bombing strategy. It concluded that the results fell short of pre-war predictions. Enemy morale was never broken. Industrial output was not completely crippled (e.g., machine tools were found to be more durable than the factories that housed them). Given the human cost of the bombing campaign, it would be hard to term this a success. The only plus is that defending against the USAAF and RAF bombers meant that the Germans had to devote 250,000 troops to man thousands of 88mm AA pieces that might have otherwise been used against Allied tanks (the 88 was a dual-purpose weapon).
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank