Concept

Konrad Zuse

Overview

Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse (; German: [ˈkɔnʁaːt ˈtsuːzə]; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse is regarded by some as the inventor and father of the modern computer.

Zuse was noted for the S2 computing machine, considered the first process control computer. In 1941, he founded one of the earliest computer businesses, producing the Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer. From 1943 to 1945 he designed Plankalkül, the first high-level programming language. In 1969, Zuse suggested the concept of a computation-based universe in his book Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space).

Much of his early work was financed by his family and commerce, but after 1939 he was given resources by the government of Nazi Germany. Due to World War II, Zuse's work went largely unnoticed in the United Kingdom and United States. Possibly his first documented influence on a US company was IBM's option on his patents in 1946. The Z4 also served as the inspiration for the construction of the ERMETH, the first Swiss computer and one of the first in Europe.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

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Now, we propose in the first place to show, that this law of organic progress is the law of all progress. Whether it be in the development of the Earth, in the development of Life upon its surface, in the development of Society, of Government, of Manufactures, of Commerce, of Language, Literature, Science, Art, this same evolution of the simple into the complex, through successive differentiations, holds throughout…
Herbert Spencer, Essays on education and kindred subjects
States what Konrad Zuse is.
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He found astonishing differences in the rapidity, some taking four times as long as others to absorb the paragraph, and the swiftest readers being, as a rule, the best immediate recollectors, too. But not,--and this is my point,--_not_ the most _intellectually capable subjects_, as tested by the results of what Mr.
William James, Talks To Teachers On Psychology
Close in meaning to Konrad Zuse; the term itself is not named.
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In each case we shall see as before, how the idea of equality underlies all quantitative prevision; and in what simple forms this idea is first applied. As already shown, the first theorem established in mechanics was, that equal weights suspended from a lever with equal arms would remain in equilibrium. Archimedes discovered that a lever with unequal arms was in equilibrium when one weight was to its arm as the…
Herbert Spencer, Illustrations of Universal Progress
Close in meaning to Konrad Zuse; the term itself is not named.
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