Computers During World War Two: Konrad Zuse | Hacker News Reader

Computers During World War Two: Konrad Zuse

waste.informatik.hu-berlin.de

41 pointsda027 comments

It is often said that war spurs innovation, with WWII as the prime example. To some extend that might be true for the USA and in particular the bay area. But I wonder what all those great minds could have achieved if they hadn't been forced (by circumstance or otherwise) to work on machines for destruction.

We also tend to forget that WWII utterly destroyed the scientifically and industrially most advanced nation at the time: Germany. That must have set us back a few years.

It has set back Europe mainly. Not the US. The US (and the Soviet Union) imported all available scientic knowledge from Germany after the war. Even before the war many European scientists (especially those with jewish background) moved to the US. After the war the US searched even for those who were Nazis. Remember Wernher von Braun? He played a central role at NASA. Before that he was a part of the German war machine.

Zuse tried to be sucessful after the war in Germany. In a different environment (for example the US) he might have been more influential. I don't know why he didn't move to the US.

I saw him once when he was old and his ideas were slightly strange.

I should also mention that the linked article paints a very rosy picture about Zuse. In the last years there was some discussion about how much he worked for the Nazi war machine and whether his biography is correct.

You miss the opportunity cost. There was still a lot of time an energy spent in the US on ways to destroy enemies. You can't measure what would have been if these resources had been put on other tasks.

People and organizations - such as aristocrats and governments - that have large amounts of money to spend as patrons of science, also tend to be very interested in finding new ways to destroy enemies. It has been this way for centuries, even millennia.

Couple of years ago, I visited the computer museum in Berlin. I made a lot of pictures of the Zuse computers which were on display there. You can find those here on my Dutch site: http://thenextcorner.com/2008/01/zuse-computer-tentoonstelli...

Amazing that a fully mechanical machine was able to make calculations based on a programming language.

Around 1990 my girlfriend and I visited Deutches Museum in Munich. At one point we both stood bent over a display intensely studying something when we were approached by an elderly gentleman. "I guess you are into computers?" "Yes we both are?" "Then I have a hot tip for you, around that corner they are working on restoring one of the old Z-machines to make it work again. Konrad Zuse himself is helping out." We vent there and saw three people concentrated around several very big blueprints. One of them was and old man with snow-white hair, holding a big yellowed sheet filled with a big mesh of electrical diagramming. Still going strong at the age of 80. A special gem to take away from that visit.

The TC proof for Zuse's Z3 is worth a read: http://www.zib.de/zuse/Inhalt/Kommentare/Html/0684/universal...

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