Slashdot Mirror
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.]"
A calculator is a computer... it uh, computes.
No- it's just that the program was always stored in permanent storage, not in RAM is all. No different than today's PocketPC devices that execute directly from storage memory, or even from a flash card.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Seriously, this is old news. I have a general-interest computer book from 1971 that has a page or so on Zuse and his Z3.
So, the question is: what brought this up? Why did the Register feel the need to suddenly revisit this topic? Is it an anniversary or something? There's nothing in the article to indicate anything like that.
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
But then, that wouldn't have been the Nazis that we know and hate. The entire system was highly unstable because it was based foremost upon the inherently self-descructive foundation of the cult of personality. The Nazi regime couldn't have evolved any other way than it did because not the best and brightest made it to the top, but those who could espouse dogma the loudest. That there were also brilliant people amongst the Nazis was an accident rather than a consequence of the system.
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.
A Turing machine isn't a stored program computer, the "program" is really the machine itself, and this is seen as the "canonical, mathematically correct" computer.
Well, as a German I am extremely grateful that Nazi-Germany didn't win the war. As a self-thinking individual I would have probably ended up in the camps, myself.
Excellence: Moderate (mostly affected by comments on your karma)
Your average calculator is repeat is a computer. A computer is anything that can recieve data, manipulate data, and then output the result.
That means humans are also computers. So are rabbits, if you count grass as 'data'. Your definition is logical, self-consistent, and totally unhelpful.
A calculator is not a computer in the sense in which that word is commonly used by the majority of speakers of the English language. Therefore, referring to a calculator as a computer will confuse people. Therefore, you should not refer to a calculator as a computer.
Well people care for the same reason that everyone remembers Niel Armstong as the first man on the moon or Hillary and Tenzing as the first people to climb Mount Everest.
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."
If Hitler hadn't been there, it's unlikely Germany would have gone to war in the first place; more likely they would simply have settled for annexing Austria and reclaiming lost territories on the Franco-German and Czech borders.
Nazi Germany's successes and failures were both a result of his thinking.
Of course, the enthusiasm for the Nazis among the upper classes of Britain and the US didn't help - the failure to support the Republicans in Spain, ignoring Mussolini's offer to turn on Hitler around the time of the annexation of Austria, and the refusal to back France over troops in the Rhine were all part of a pattern of (at best) incompetance that contributed.
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.
Not even sure whether to dignify this with a response, but regarding your absurd claim that only one method of murdering inmates was allowed per camp: if the camp commandants needed to exterminate millions of people, wouldn't they use whatever methods they could? Machine guns were used until it was realised the ammunition was costing too much, and was needed in the war effort. In typical German fashion, more efficient methods were developed. Anyone who has worked in an organisation would recognise that procedures tend to develop in an ad-hoc way in response to new events and new constraints.
BTW, instead of reading Holocaust criticism and forming ever-darker opinions of Jews, why not try to talk to some? Especially Holocaust survivors, of which there are few left. It's easy to hate people in the abstract. Challenge yourself humanly, if you have any humanity left, that is.