Konrad Zuse and the digital revolution he started 75 years ago

- Plankalkuel, by some criteria the first high-level programming language [1].

- Digital physics [2]. I have no idea if this is taken seriously by physicists.

- First chess program, predating Wiener, Shannon and Turing [3].

- First implementation of floating point numbers [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalkül

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_Space

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess#Chronology

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#History

Turing did brilliant work, but Zuse did the job of Turing and Tommy Flowers, working in isolation with very limited resources.

This is because the Z3 had no conditional branching. In 1998 it was shown that the Z3 actually didn't need conditional branching, and it was Turing complete but only because it is possible to unroll conditional statements into a version where both branches are evaluated and then the result of one is cancelled. However, at the time of the Z3's development and use, this wasn't known.

So while the Z3 is indeed an important early computer, it shares a significant discontinuity with modern computing that reflects the time. The Z3 was not intended as a "computer" in the modern sense, it was more of a calculating machine that could perform repeat arithmetic more quickly. It was never intended for the more complex roles we use computers in today.

A lot of people don't count the Z3 as the first programmable digital computer because of this limitation. If you disqualify it for that reason, the title probably goes to the British Colossus the next year.

Obviously Zuse did develop conditional branching (such as in his language Plankalkül), but that was years later and by then it had already been done by others. To Zuse's credit, he probably would have gotten to it much faster had he not had a real problem with allied bombing destroying his work.

A major takeaway from this is that assigning titles like "first" and "inventor of computing" is quite silly. Computer science developed very, very quickly, with many of it key developments made by multiple people in parallel. We are largely familiar with what happened in the West for sociopolitical reasons, but similar work was done in Germany and the Soviet Union, often successfully. However, calling Zuse the inventor of computer science is as uncharitable to Turing as the reverse is to Zuse, both had their successes and failures.

When I give talks on computer history, I often like to say things like "Steve Jobs, inventor of the Computer" to elicit a laugh. The unfortunate thing is that sometimes people don't realize that it's a joke.

Holy smokes, what an inaccurate statement. Arguably one of the obstacles to progress in technology is due the persistence of the fundamental computer design that has been employed since "Baby" ran its first program just before lunch on June 21, 1948, including an approach to fast random memory accesses. This approach was novel, based on CRTs used in radar. Most everything else -- design-wise -- was from the Moore School Lectures of 1946. And the really inspirational part of those was from the work on the ENIAC.

The missing piece that needs to be more generally appreciated is how the early work on practical, general-purpose computers was quietly done in England while the Americans were squabbling over who was first.

I'd be very interested in a detailed comparison between whatever IBM was using at the time, the capabilities of the Z3, and whether it could have been modified to do the types of work IBM did. IBM's primary notoriety about all this is that they helped the Nazis to locate members of groups to be exterminated, but I expect that was a small part of what they did for the Nazis. But no IBM execs faced the Nuremburg Tribunals.

Also, I think Zuse at least somewhat well known in the U.S. The most basic computer books I have seen all have something about him. The information is available and common in the U.S. in elementary computer books like they use to teach schoolkids what computers are. I've read a fair amount of stuff about him in elementary school computer texts that I got in thrift stores and like that. The basic information about who he was and what he did is commonly available. Details are less common, so when I saw the post I immediately checked it out, whereas I more commonly open up pages in new tabs and read them after I've done my shopping through the feed. But the reason I recognized the name of the man and the machine is because of elementary school books that I picked up in a thrift store in 99.

If you like these strange connections you should go and read about the Jacquard loom, that was using punch cards to control the patterns produced! It can be argued that "programmability" came before general purpose computing...