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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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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 .
> 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.
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
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.
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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).
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
"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.
True enough- though this was more like 4 flops (an add instruction every quarter of a second). I know a few little kids who are that fast, at least for under 4-bit numbers. Then they discover calculators and lose the ability.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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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."
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.
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).
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 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
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 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.