<
computer> The third computer designed and built by {Konrad
Zuse} and the first
digital computer to successfully run
real programs. The computer was ready in 1941, five years
before
ENIAC.
Zuse began his work on program-driven calculating machines in
1935. His two predessors of the
Z3, the Z1 and Z2, were
unsuccessful mechanical calculating machines. The
Z3 was
delivered to the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt
(German Experimental Department of Aeronautics) in Berlin and
was used for deciphering coded messages. A 1960
reconstruction of the
Z3 is in the Deutsche Museum in Munich.
The
Z3 used about 2600 relays of the kind used in
telecommunications. Zuse wrote and implemented the language
Plankalkül on the
Z3. Programs were punched into cinefilm.
Zuse built some more computers after World War II, including
the
Z3's successor, the Z4, which was set up at ETH Zurich,
Switzerland.
Of the potential rival claimants to the title of first
programmable computer,
Babbage (UK, c1840) planned but was
not able to build a
decimal, programmable machine.
Atanasoff's
ABC, completed in 1942 was a special purpose
calculator, like those of
Pascal (1640) and
Leibniz
(1670). Eckert and Mauchly's
ENIAC (US), as originally
released in 1946, was programmable only by manual rewiring or,
in 1948, with switches. None of these machines was freely
programmable. Neither was
Turing et al.'s
Colossus (UK,
1943-45).
Aiken's
MARK I (1944) was programmable but
still decimal, without separation of storage and control.
[
Features? Where was it designed? Contemporaries?]
http://cs.tu-berlin.de/Z3zuse.
http://epemag.com/zuse.
(2003-10-01)