seems a bit biased.
Can't you just marvel at the achievement without worrying whether celebrating this could be seen as taking something away from somebody else?
Personally I don't care much who was first. There were others roughly around the same time trying similar things. It's the same with "who invented the airplane" and "who invented radio". Many countries lay claim to having been the first to do X or Y. I don't care much and I don't think anybody else should.
Zuse built an amazing machine. Does that not warrant a bit of respect? Add that he had no help from the government or any big company. Does that still not warrant a bit of respect?
In my life I have "invented" quite a few algorithms that later turned out to be an old hat because smarter people had already invented them years or even decades earlier. To me that does not take away from my achievement :-)
It's not important whether you are the first one to achieve something. It is important that you achieved it.
Eny seems to be one of humanities driving forces. If it was in tech only. I once passed through Gilroy in California which claims to be "Garlic Capital of the World" … and I visited Lautrec, where they already grew their (delicious) pink garlic since the middle ages. All I care for is taste, not quantity of production.
And let's not start to think about the various books of records, sigh. Or 100 places or things to do or visit before one dies?
It is the CADT culture. Those people cannot concentrate on something. If an UI is not changed every 2 Months then it is not worth using it.
When I was younger, I took debates over "who invented X" at face value, based on how engaged and serious others were about them: That person alone had the idea first, all by themselves, and realized it.
As an adult of course I realize the world is much more complicated. By and large, inventions don't happen in a vacuum, they occur when their time has come. Knowledge/ideas/theory/precursors are floating about, often there is a community of people already engaged in the area, and then at best someone makes a notable contribution or excels at integration, often boosted by fortuitous circumstances.
Yet these topics are rarely if ever reported on that way. At most you get a "someone else had written about it already in a paper" + debate about the chances the inventor had known and read about the paper (I think for Zuse this is the debate about whether he had read Turing or not).
For examples like this I'd love to read a more nuanced piece that takes me into the inventor's world first: What were the hot topics of their day? What devices were known to them already? Who were they in contact with? What inspired them? What allowed them to get organized and pursue a particular path? etc.
More often than not invention is a long process that involves multiple heads and years to decades.
I think I want a book like "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes, which really excels at sketching the milieu of first-half 20th century physics, but with Turing, von Neumann, Zuse, etc. instead ...
In his own words:
I started in 1934, working independently and without knowledge of other developments going on around me. In fact, I hadn't even heard of Charles Babbage when I embarked on my work.
There's another interesting tidbit: John von Neumann lived in Berlin 1926-1929 and was a lecturer at Zuse's university. Contact has not been reported, and Zuse was at highschool for most of that time, but they may have crossed paths, or at least there may have been indirect intellectual influence via the surroundings Zuse studied in subsequently.
It's stunning (and sad) sometimes just how much of the modern world was about to reveal itself in the academic communities of Berlin of the 20s and 30s before facism tore it asunder.