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Comment by tiatia | Hacker News Reader

Konrad Who?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse

Most remarkable:

> Zuse completed his work entirely independently of other leading computer scientists and mathematicians of his day. Between 1936 and 1945, he was in near-total intellectual isolation.

The person who invented the computer. Which somehow no US school teaches about.

He also developed a very awesome high-level language very early on.

Charles Babbage is as far as I know the uncontested inventor of the computer, which somehow even German schools teach about.

Was it Turing complete? Because Zuse's Z3 was.

I'm not saying though, that this is a criteria for calling any machine a computer. But it's probably what sets Zuse's achievement apart.

UPDATE: I've just learned that Babbage's language was also Turing complete. So Zuse's achievement is solely having physically built the first working computer, while Babbage's machine was never realized.

Babbage invented the concept of the programmable computer, Zuse built a programmable electronic computer, which could later be shown to be turing-complete. Those things are pretty subtle, and the 'national' version is always the least subtle, I guess ;)

Leonardo da Vinci also invented tanks and helicopters, and then it took a couple of hundred years to build some.

And Pascal invented the calculator

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_calculator

Slight difference - da Vinci's tanks and helicopters wouldn't actually have worked, whereas the Analytical Engine absolutely would have.

"Absolutely would have worked" is probably the closest you can get to modern software development ;)

Or more seriously put: It's a concept for a machine with 55k moving parts and powered by a steam engine. "Would work" is probably a bold statement considering how far off theoretical designs always are from the engineering reality, by all experience.

http://plan28.org/

"We have been pecking away at Babbage’s original design drawings for some while now and have found with regret that we are unable to reverse engineer a coherent and consistent understanding of the Analytical Engine from the mechanical drawings alone. "

http://blog.plan28.org/2016/05/spring-2016-report-to-compute...

If you read further, it becomes pretty clear that it's more or less a theoretical idea. A great one though, granted.

> Because Zuse's Z3 was.

That's debatable. Maybe it was turing complete on the paper but it was never designed to be and it was not used as a turing complete machine.

> So Zuse's achievement is solely having physically built the first working computer, while Babbage's machine was never realized.

And the fact that Z3 was based on binary, while the analytical engine wasn't.

Which creates the interesting questions of:

1. Is da Vinci (or someone earlier) the inventor of the helicopter? Does invention include something working?

2. What is a computer? A calculator? Is the Antikythera a computer? Does it need to be Turing complete?

3. Didn't hear about Babbage in 13y of German schools ;-) But then what are schools? Is university included in "school"?

Technically the first computers were (mainly) females who were good at maths and were put forward to compute maths tables for the navy. In fact the reason that we call (modern) computers by that name is because they are named after the original humans who did the job. In fact Babbage worked on the calculation engine(s) precisely to aid in the automated calculations that they would be providing, including identifying several corrections in log tables that were printed around that time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer

The first electromechanical computers were arguably the Lorenz machine (reconstruction at TNMOC next to Bletchley Park) and the Bombe (a reconstruction of which is available at Bletchley park). The first electrical only computer was ENIAC, though you tend not to hear about these from American historians as some of these facts were classified until (relatively) recently.

If all we're going for is "first $something computer" then Leibniz probably wins.

"Invented the computer" is a strong assertion. I rather like Walter Isaacson's history on "The Innovators", where he talks about the parallel creations of Zuse and other inventors, to show that things are not as black-and-white; that the "inventor of the computer" depends on a murky definition of what a "computer" is, and what the final act of creating it is.

It's more likely that we should attribute the invention of the computer to a collective group of individuals; some that advanced the notion of what a computer should work a little bit, some that advanced a lot, and some that had good ideas that didn't go anywhere at the time.

Going from "some mechanical devices" to "a fully electric computer with a higher level programming language and full turing capabilities" is quite a leap. That’s the pretty much what "inventing" something means.

The person described in the article that you didn't read.

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