 |
For his invention of the first program-controlled, electromechanical, digital computer and the first high-level programming language, "Plankalkül."
|
Konrad Zuse is largely unknown in North America but is a celebrated computer pioneer in his native Germany. Zuse developed functioning program-controlled computing machinery as early as 1936 and went on to form a successful European computer business in the 1950s.
Many encyclopedias and other reference works state that the first large-scale automatic digital computer was the Harvard Mark 1. However, in the aftermath of World War II it was discovered that a program-controlled computer called the Z3 had been completed in Germany in 1941, which means that the Z3 pre-dated the Harvard Mark I. The Z3's architect was Konrad Zuse, who developed his first machine, the Z1, in his parents' living room in Berlin in 1938. Although based on relays, the Z3 was very sophisticated for its time; for example, it utilized the binary number system and could perform floating-point arithmetic.
Zuse was an amazing man who was years ahead of his time. To fully appreciate his achievements, it is necessary to understand that his background was in construction and civil engineering (not electronics). Also, Zuse was completely unaware of any computer-related developments in Germany or in other countries until a very late stage, so he independently conceived and implemented the principles of modern digital computers in isolation. Today, the Z3 is widely acknowledged as being the first fully functional automatic digital computer.