The long lost manual for the Zuse Z4 has been found
vice.com
vice.com
There's an obscure and easy to miss sign (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse#/media/File:2007-0...) on the house he lived in while working on it, and another sign at the technical university, but that's about it. No big festivities in his name, no commemorations, nothing.
Just imagine if the first digital computer was built somewhere in the US or in the UK. I'm sure we'd hear about until the end of times. Strange how that works.
I find it quite interesting that the fact that he was on the losing side of that war meant that he had to make due with limited resources which positively influenced his design choices and as such shaped his perspectives of what computers can and should be.
Neil Gershenfeld at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms has often said that 'computer science is one of the worst things to happen to either computing or science. The canon of computer science that's currently taught prematurely froze a model of computation based on 1950s technology'
I think you can see a sort of stunted alternate path of computation and the connection it has to the physical world in the kinds of projects that Zuse participated in post WWII:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odwgpKRnWM8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pxv4vDMOFCo
For various reasons Turing captures the contemporary pop culture imagination but I have a feeling that historians in 50-100 years will look back at Zuse as being equally if not more so influential.
I bet that Von Neumann would get a chuckle at how influential his throw away architecture ended up being to our society and would agree with Gershenfeld about how unfortunate it is that its success prematurely froze the model of computation.
A request by his co-worker Helmut Schreyer—who had helped Zuse build the Z3 prototype in 1938[21]—for government funding for an electronic successor to the Z3 was denied as "strategically unimportant".
Many great inventions have a nationalist folklore surrounding it, often ascribing a development to some national hero, while ignoring the process of development as a whole or parallel developments in other countries (e.g. the car, the airplane, the telephone).
On the other hand, Zuse is indeed obscure in Germany overall. Maybe it had to do with the fact that he wasn’t really commercially successful, he did not build some computing Empire out of his inventions. He wasn’t a Silicon Valley style entrepreneur. Something to consider for the engineers among us: it’s not enough to build/invent a thing.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1945455
http://www.inf.fu-berlin.de/inst/ag-ki/rojas_home/documents/...
For Turing completeness, a fixed, constant-sized program needs to be able to handle arbitrary inputs and use arbitrary amounts of memory. It's important to distinguish the model from the implementation here. Theoretically, a language like Python is Turing complete. (And BTW you don't need infinite precision integers or anything fancy: you can simply simulate the tape with an object graph.) Practically, every Python program running on a real computer will run out of memory eventually.
Anyway, the translated Z3 programs in this paper contain one case statement for every possible memory location. This means that for a given program size, you're limited to run in O(1) space. That's only as powerful as a finite state machine, not a Turing machine.
I see nothing in the paper that convincingly addresses this limitation. There are some arguments to the effect that practical CPUs have limited address space as well. Which is true, but that argument only shows that those aren't Turing complete either, not that the Z3 magically is.
Maybe there's a subtle point that I overlooked, but at the moment, I'm simply not convinced.
The two things missing from what would normally be considered a universal computer are conditionals and indirect addressing. The Z3 is also limited in that it executes a specific finite set of instructions in linear order, with no branching.
In the proof, they get around the finite length of a program by literally creating a loop -- they glue one end of the paper tape of the program to the other so that the computer can keep executing the same instruction stream forever. Then they get around the lack of indirect addressing by accessing every memory location in every loop. I agree that it's very much a stretch to call the Z3 Turing complete.
I agree with that analysis and think Turing-completeness is overrated.
Surprised in away that Zuze wasn't snapped up by operation paperclip.
(Claims below are completely opinions, very unsubstantiated, yours might vary, doesn't matter, just my musings. Take it as a light-hearted commentary, not some hill I'd be willing to die on.)
So what even amuses me further is how I find the question of the earliest computer as largely political for lack of a better term. Most of the world would say it's either Alan Turing and his work at Enigma, some would claim Charles Babbage. Growing up in SE Asia, some of my elementary books would even claim the abacus as the earliest "computing device" (I disagree on principle). And of course, Berlin, Germany would say it is Konrad Zuse.
It seems to me this is because there is a very loose definition of "achieving computing". I won't get into Turing vs Zuse, but consider the arguments I remember for the abacus:
- it aids computation, was used as, basically, a calculator
- yes you can still make mistakes, but hey garbage-in garbage out!
- interpreting the configurations of the device to mean something is not so different from interpreting a computer's state through the configuration of lights on your monitor
Of course, if you qualify the debate as achieving electronic computing, then we have a bit more to chew on. But I imagine you could hammer arguments to go either way even with the "electronic" qualifier.
It was developed by Germans, so SuSE means: Software und System-Entwicklung (or english: Software and systems development)
Additionally, Zuse was colaborating and supported from the Nazi-Regime, even though he himself was not a Nazi, nor did he directly supported their crimes. But this stain dimished education about his work for a long time.
Apologies for the confusing video, but you're watching a master of dark humor.
https://research.tilburguniversity.edu/en/publications/an-in...
Further, there was a conference/show to celebrate Zuse's 100th birthday, organized by the Tagesspiegel newspaper. This event was repeated for the last two years, I think.
Zuse built the first computers in Berlin, but they were only used in the war-time government ministries afaik. After the war, he sold his first computer, which I would consider commercial available, to ETH Zurich in Switzerland. He founded 2 companies, but both were not successful compared to e.g. Intel. He would be really famous and well-known if he had managed to create a computing giant. He never had a university employment, so his papers were not well known compared to Turing and there weren't a lot of them. He even didn't publish his PhD thesis where he invented the first programming language and created an elaborate demo in which he programmed the first chess engine (also afaik). I think in science being the first is overrated and not that important. You have to publish and popularise your idea to really have an impact (schmidhuber would disagree). So his intellectual legacy was merely that he was the first, but not really influential. And his commercial success was also limited.
I think it's tragic, it was an enormous wasted potential for germany. It might be that he never was the great entrepreneur with the skills to build a tech-giant, but he was undoubtedly a genius who invented the future. He could have an enormous impact if he were equipped with a big lab and funding, if he would have taken the academic route. But Germany wasn't (and is still not) able to support geniuses that don't complete the usual strict path to professorship (study -> phd -> habilitation/post-doc).
Not sure if you would like to see newer machines or older ones. If you are complaining about the missing old ones, then it's not true.
The Deutsches Museum in Munich as a Z3 and a Z4:
https://www.deutsches-museum.de/ausstellungen/kommunikation/...
It also has a "Siemens 2002" from 1960.
https://www.deutsches-museum.de/ausstellungen/kommunikation/...
And a UNIVAC I (IBM) from 1956:
https://www.deutsches-museum.de/typo3temp/pics/c0ba1ee858.jp...
If you´re interested in Zuse history, there´s a great exhibition of Zuse machines at the Huenfeld museum (the town where Zuse rebuilt his company after WW2): https://www.zuse-museum-huenfeld.de/ and the computing centre at Erlangen University (FAU) has restored their Z23 to working condition some years ago: https://www.video.uni-erlangen.de/search/term.html?q=Z23
The Technikmuseum in Berlin also has a Z3 replica built by Horst Zuse (Konrad Zuse´s son) and his students: http://z3-computer.de/
Most of the linked pages are in German, the Erlangen page has some interesting videos.
I can but hope it won't change too much. I love the exhibit on nuclear power (with a life-sized cutaway of a containment vessel), the air&space exhibit (which includes a V2, and a piece of the moon) and the Newtonian physics exhibit.
Note the Vice article doesn't link to the manual directly, and the site it DOES link to has an incorrectly formatted link to the manual. Pretty sad show all around.
Should include "Don't be funny."