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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.]"
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. (> <)
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.
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
Pffft, everybody knows that an ABACUS is base 10, not binary, so it's not eligible as a computer. I'm willing to bet that an unnamed leper with one finger on each hand and one toe on each foot was the first binary computer.
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.
And if properly prepared, at least two good meals.
Relays.
I've always wondered what the Nazis would have accomplished if Hitler and his henchmen had been slightly more practical minded and had:
(1) 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.
(2) Made the Final Solution a post-war ambition. There were a lot of resources wasted on the Death Camps and other essentially political/sociological obsessions. Not only did this limit Nazi Germany's resources, but it limited their access to a large segment of educated people.
There's probably a mildly entertaining alt-history story about a Nazi government that decides to pursue its racial ambitions after it conquers Russia and England and so succeeds due to the reallocation of resources.
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.
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 unsubstantiated claims? Some rebuild of it stands in the German Museum in Munic for decades.
There have even been java-applets simulating it for years. Just because you didn't know it, it is
no rewriting of history. Calling something else but the Z3 the first computer would be rewriting of history.
(Next time you want to tell be Edison invented the light bulb)
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'
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.
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
Ahem, that's first programmable computer. The greek's still beat him to the first (known) computer millenia ago.
common sense: noun
What those who are ignorant of the subject matter think; usually wrong.
To answer point2:
Yes, i used to think so, too. But there are two things to notice:
a) By confiscating jewing poperty they could help finance their war preperation. Just seizing random assets/corporations would have aggravated the military industry, but with the jews they didnt care...
b) Most people werent killed at once. They had to do slave labour till they were nearly dead, and were gassed then.
Even high-tech stuff like the V1s were assembled by prisoners from concentration camps.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
Your point 2 is the most important reason why the Germans lost. Hitler was so convinced about his Final Solution that he spent a vast amount of the German military's resources on killing all the inferior races instead of keeping supplies to his front line. That coupled with the two front war. Wikipedia's (they're down for maintence at the moment) article states that had the German troops not gone through Belgium to get to France the English wouldn't have gotten involved as early as they did.
Learn something new.
It was used to solve a problem with wing vibration. I wish they knew how long that actually took to run. I had my Ti-85 in college and it was painfully slow on rendering 3D graphs. Still...it was much faster than doing it by hand. Very cool.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
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.
Hind-sight is ALWAYS 20/20.
I am sure Hitler cooked everyone when he did, just so he could get as many done as he could. Let's be realistic here... I doubt Hitler expected to even get as far as he did... he WANTED to, but cmon... Germany... the rest of the world... no matter how full of yourself you are, "Trying to take over the world" is not a goal I think anyone feels they can accomplish.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
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.
> Sounds awfully familiar right now...
He, he, I wasn't going to say that. I was going to say though that it had a lot in common with the communist block in that respect. The Soviets refrained from taking on the rest of the world in all out war, so their system lasted just a tad longer. But it also never reached self-sustaining critical mass, and it eventually imploded. That has to be said with all the credit being heaped upon the Big Gipper at the moment for having "won" the Cold War.
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
It has one. It's been compiling the 1.0 kernel since 1.0 was new. It should be finished in about 4 years.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one the bus load of girls just went down.
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.
yes, it probably was the first proper computer, although the debate is fairly pointless.
no taxation without representation!
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
When will they port Net BSD to it?
Actually, SuSe should be coming out with a port next quarter.
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)
"What are we going to do tonight, Dick?"
"The same thing we do every night, George. Trying to take over the world!"
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
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
The alternatives to Belguim would seem to be the Alps or the Maginot Line. Any thoughts on how a battle through the latter would have fared?
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
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?".
Actually, that's an intersting question. I'm thinking of the Turing conception of a computer, but could an abacus satisfy those requirements?
Da Blog
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.
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
Wow! That's an argument!
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
Germany was doomed from the start because of their alliance with Italy.
In the summer of 1939 von Ribbentrop told Winston Churchill, "If there's war, the Italians will fight on Germany's side." After a pause Churchill replied, "That's fair; we had them last time."
*snicker*
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.
Well, there is also some people believing that ancient Balts (ancestors of today's Latvians and Lithuanians) used ritual rocks as binary computers (they're keeping binary information in their opinion). I don't really understand how they think it was working, only heard such theory ;)
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
It is not that simple. With better leadership, the Nazi's might have held what they got, and forced the Soviets into a stalemate, but it isn't likely they could have actually defeated the Soviet Union.
They were fighting a battle on a massive scale. The Eastern front was close to 2,000 miles long (from Leningrad to the Black Sea). There was no real way they could keep pressure along a front that long. There just weren't enough Germans. The sheer weight of Soviet numbers was always going to turn the tide, it was mostly a question of when (and at what cost). When you add in better equipped troops for the region (the Siberian troops had real cold weather gear, the later T tanks scared the hell out of the Germans, etc), I don't know that the Germans could have won after the initial surprise factor wore off.
Individually, the German soldier was better trained and lead, but there were a lot more Russians.
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.
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 wars conclusion was almost a given in both WWI and WWII. you had one highly advanced technological country vs essentially the rest of the world. And the three largest armies of the world are all gunning for you too.
Russia would have invaded any way, taking some of the holdings the Nazi's had. It was just a matter of time. So instead of waiting for it, the Germans were beign pro-active. Russia has a immense reserve of resources and troops and much of the area Germany occupied was unfriendly terrortory. IT was obvious that they could not combat a russian invasion and stalve off a English/ American/ Canadian assualt. they closest (geographically) ally Italy didn't have much to contribute. So they decided to commit to an offensive and hopefully wrap it up before the Anglo/Americans's attacked.
But as a lot of out forces have found out, a attack on russia is never a quick or painless ordeal.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Yeah, It took them months to flush out one unit hold up in one fortress on the Maginot Line, after they had cut off re-enforcements and the supply line to the fort. Taking the line full on, from the side it was aimed at would have blunted the German advance and degenerated into anothe trench war like WWI.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
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!
this is OT but regarding your sig...
HTML renderers do that, not slashdot. You won't see more than one space on any other page unless the text is enclosed within a pre tag.
-
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!
James Watt invented the double-acting piston steam engine. It was much more efficient than Newcomen's single-acting steam engine. Edison didn't invent the incandescent light bulb, but he did improve the bulb life to the point where it was practical as a source of light.
These people didn't just put their name on someone else's invention and profit from it. They made huge improvements on them.
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.
Ok, just one question. What do the english have to do with anything? It's true that the english did manage to keep hitler from making quick work of them by air, and may even have halted his advance on that front (not that there was any further to go). But they certainly showed no signs of GAINING ground against hitler, and he didn't suffer significant loses to the english. It's actually quite unlikely that Hitler wouldn't have succeeded in taking the English however, who couldn't have lasted much longer against German fighter jets developed later in the war.
When speaking of two fronts everyone is talking about the other two military super powers (besides Germany of course), which would be soviet russia and the US.
Of the two Soviet Russia actually did more damage in fact, even if the US delivered the final blows. Germany took massively greater loses in Russia than everywhere else put together. They lost several hundred times as many units in their advance on Russia as they lost in the entire rest of the war.
And they would have beaten Russia, had it not been for the Japanese bombing pearl harbor. The Brits were doing everything they could to hold their own island, forget trying to advance. Germany wasn't under any immediate signficant threat aside from the US. If they had finished off Russia first, and then sat on their territory for a year with their newfound Russian riches and troops... Well we might be speaking German today.
Their technology was advancing rapidly, they had rockets and there is strong evidence they had a nuclear project of their own. They had jets, they had computers. Technology was definately on their side, toward the end almost every piece of german weaponry was superior to what anyone else had. Their planes were inferior to the British, so they invented the jet. Their navy was inferior to what the US had, so they devised subs. Their tanks were inferior to those of the Russians, so they invented the Panzer.
It was technical superiority, and a general who was arguably on par with the legandary Hannibal that got them as far as they were in Russia. They had incredible weapons but little money and resources to produce them. Most of what they did have was due to VERY creative accounting. With Russia and a year or two they would have all the resources they needed. Their jets would have made short work of Britain then and after that the US would have had a serious run for their money (in fact they'd likely lose.. the US has never had to fight a serious battle on their home turf with anything vaguely like modern weaponry). Also with what we know now (the US didn't exactly have nukes coming out their arses and weren't even vaguely prepared to have more anytime soon).
After that they would need to regroup and take out Japan. Since controlling the US (the true jackpot of virtually infinite wealth and resources) and Russia (next runner up on wealth and resources at the time) AND England (certainly no slouch even if not comparable to the other two). The germans would have had enough resources that eliminating their former allies in Italy and Japan would be a fairly simple task. After that it's really a matter of cleanup.
The far east is a simple matter of being willing to throw enough men and bombs at them to do the job, since the far east is mostly all deeply entrenched in their homelands. I doubt Hitler would have cared how many men it took.
Africa... well without us breaking their codes and intercepting fuel being sent to Africa (essentially leaving Romel sitting on a fleet of useless tanks) conquering Africa would have been trivial.
Oh wait, that's right, the Canadians would have stopped them!
I suppose what is truely amazing is that he DID get as far as he did, and with a bankrupt nation besides. The scary thing is that he got far enough that if he had played his cards right, he would have won. Not might, would have, period.
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
A good novel by Bruce Sterling called The Difference Engine. A 'what if' story, had his computer been built.
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 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-
In all fairness, many of the things that german generals claimed were big mistakes Hitler made on the eastern front, are either monday morning quarterbacking, or just completely wrong. There was strong tendency for generals to blame everything on "that austrian corporal" after the war. In many cases there were significant disagreements at german high command during the war, and choices Hitler made were usually backed by some, disagreed with by others.
For example, the decision in winter of -41 to not retreat was probably the right thing to do -- even though it caused heavy casualties (due to bad/non-existing planning for wintertime war), many war historians think the army would have been pretty much destroyed had they tried to retreat: army could barely hold their own, and organized retreat is more difficult thing to do than to stand your ground. Napoleon, for example, didn't lose against russian s in the battlefield; he lost by war of attrition when he retreated from Russia.
This is not to say Hitler didn't make mistakes (obviously he did his share), or that generals didn't often have better understanding of the situation. This was especially evident later on; after D-day many of Hitler's decisions were too ambitious, putting too much faith in his army's offensive capabilities (for example; about 2 months after D-day allies got their real breakthrough mostly thanks to Hitler ordering an attack by all his troops, on west flank of US troops... allowing brits to finally capture Caen, leading to collapse of german front). But not everything that was claimed to be his (and only his) military mistake was one, and many of generals would have made equally bad (if not the same) mistakes.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
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.
Are you just tryin to be an ass, or are you really supportive of what Germany was trying to do? Don't you know that Hitler ordered the destruction of Paris, and his general conspired to disobey him? It's a pretty famous story. Don't you know that Hitler didn't actually believe that France had a civilization worth saving? He only believed in German civilization, and only his approved German civilization. And look at what was done in the Soviet Union, the destruction of cities not for military reasons but for the goal of killing off people. Tell us, now that you've spent so much time defending how restrained the Germans were, are you denying that the Holocaust took place? Tell us straight out. No evasions.
That's gotta fit into your schema somewhere
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
Ah, you're a denier. You're deluded. I actually studied all this stuff academically, got my MA in Eastern European History. Visted the concentration camp sites. Read all the books that you probably think are propaganda. You're just a sad pathetic person trying to spread lies.
That's gotta fit into your schema somewhere
Suse's S3. There was a misunderstanding on a telephone call.
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.
See, the Nazis weren't aliens visiting germany between 1933 and 1945. They were part of this country before and after and the old establishment of the Kaiserreich as well as other powers (economy) supported them. So the german forces participated quite willingly in most of the sick stuff. Maybe Hitler was a bad military leader, but most of the generals supported his ideas as long they thought they could win the war.
could have actually won the Eastern Front
Never. Ever. The Soviet Union just had too many people and resources.
There were a lot of resources wasted on the Death Camps and other essentially political/sociological obsessions
Yeah, right. Those obsessions were what made the system tick. Without those: No Nazis. No WWII.
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.
Their navy was inferior to what the US had, so they devised subs.
Subs? As in submarines? You know, those things that have been built since the late (really late) 19th Century? I realize I'm nit-picking, but subs were already a done deal for WWII. In fact, it was a German sub sinking the Lusitania that brought the US into WWI. ;) (They were called U-boats then, as in Underwater Boats)
Like what I said? You might like my music
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 eloquently stated in Joseph Heller's "Catch-22", Italy was silently winning the war while the other countries were getting their troops killed.
What lies? We aren't even talking about the holocaust. Where did that come from? We are talking about your assertion that Hitler wanted to destroy France, and was only ammeliorated by a rebellious general.
Provide your source. If you studied it academically, that shouldn't be a problem. But of course, you are full of shit and won't provide anything because your life is a fiction, including your bullshit degree.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
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.
Have you ever been to London?
I live London and whole swathes of the city were destroyed. I assume you were a tourist and as such you are unlilkely to have spent much time in the East End where most of the damage was inflicted, as this is where the industry was and it is closer to Germany. If you want to see an example of a city that was destroyed then visit Coventry, once one of the most beautiful medieval cities in England, now a horrific area of 1950s and 1960s concrete tower blocks.
I'm not denying that we didn't destroy German cities, and I think "Bomber" Harris should be viewed as a war criminal for inventing the concept of carpet bombing civilian areas, but it wasn't just the Germans that suffered...
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.
Where I got that you're a holocaust denier was from the post where you wrote:
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?When I asked you if you believed the holocaust took place, you didn't answer the question.
As for Paris:
http://search.eb.com/normandy/articles/Choltitz_Di etrich_von.html
http://www.fact-index.com/d/di/dietrich_von_cholti tz.html
http://www.historynet.com/wwii/blparissavior/
That was a quick 5 minute search. Since we're way off topic, and you are using typical trolls method of avoiding real conversation, (trying to constantly shift the discussion when challenged on a point) I'm going to end this discussion.That's gotta fit into your schema somewhere
Nachdem ich Deine ersten Zeilen gelesen habe, in denen Du ja deutlich machst, dass Du mir ohnehin nicht glaubst, habe ich mir gespart den Rest zu lesen.
Die Geschichte die ich in der Schule gelehrt bekam und und die Geschichten die mir meine eignen Familienmitglieder berichteten, haben nie im Widerspruch gestandenden. Auch sprechen die noch exestierenden Lager eine sehr deutliche Sprache.
Dein Leugnen dieser Geschichte und Dein Herumhacken auf "den Juden" ist ein bedauerlich Zeugniss dafuer, dass diese Minderheit selbst heute noch auch in den USA mit Diskrimenierung rechnen muss.
It's one hell of a statement. Just like in poker, playing your cards right doesn't always mean you'll win. Hell it doesn't even mean you'll come out well. Just like poker, it's possible for EVERYONE to play their cards right and there still to be only one victor.
Saying that a bankrupt nation with a low population could have conquered the entire world simply by using proper strategy is one hell of a statement. To pick a random example, no matter how well they play their cards, Poland for instance couldn't have then, or now even began to conquer the world.
It's not even like we are talking about numerous things, we are talking about a single strategic decision.
Ehh, you've got the wrong idea on many points.
They lost several hundred times as many units in their advance on Russia as they lost in the entire rest of the war. And they would have beaten Russia, had it not been for the Japanese bombing pearl harbor
Russia has the timeless advantage of being a glorious, yet unattainable goal. The steppes are a vast land area compared to Europe, and this changes everything when it comes to managing armies. Not only must you spread out your front lines, but your rear guards and supply lines are stretched paper-thin by the time you've made any significant advances.
When Hitler grew stubborn and attempted to take Stalingrad, his supply lines and rear guard were in just such a situation. Russian forces took advantage of the situation, and used a pincer attack to cut supply lines while keeping the Germans in the Caucasus busy.
The point is, Hitler's supply lines were already stretched to the breaking point. If the Russians hadn't cracked them at Stalingrad, they would have cracked them elsewhere, because Hitler was foolish and thought the blitzkreig to be unstoppable. The fool never bothered to check how many HUNDREDS OF TONS of fuel a day those panzer divisions required.
Assuming the Japanese left the US out of the war, Germany COULD have beaten Russia if they had slowed down and built infarstructure in the places they conquered, but that would have taken years. This is not the kind of glorious win that keeps people in fear and awe of a government.
As for your nuclear arguement:
Before the war, the international scientific community discovered that fission was possible with uranium, and this had been published.
The US began researching nuclear weapons after the war broke out because they believed the Germans were researching such weapons. This research began before the US entered the war, as a preventive measure. Although progress would have been slower if the Japanese had not dragged the US into the war, there is no doubt in my mind that the project would have come to fruition.
Japan didn't have an active nuclear weapons program, but they did consider the possibility. Their top scientests determined that the strain on the empire to build such a weapon would be too great, so it was not persued.
Germany didn't actually have a nuclear weapons program. Their top scientests knew fission was feasable, but could not guarantee on theory alone that it could be turned into a weapon. The German High Command instead funded research into nuclear power generation, and this is why the Germans were interested in heavy water from Norway.
The irony is, if the Germans hadn't been so interested in controlling the only major heavy water source in the world, we might not have been so suspicious. It certainly would have slowed down our own nuclear developments if they had not done so.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
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)
Some of the German researchers moved east after the war, some west. Most of the time this wasn't even political belief but pure opportunism. These who were Nazi believers rather cooperated with the US. Guess how many Nazis cooperated with the CIA after the war.
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.