WHAT WAS THE FIRST COMPUTER IN HISTORY?
By Rodrigo Díaz López
In a previous article we solved the dilemma of whether software or hardware came first, indicating that the first computer programs were developed in 1843 by Ada Lovelace. However, we left the answer to the question of which was the first computer in history floating in the air. As is sometimes the case, a simple question can be very difficult to answer.
Firstly, the first computers were built during the Second World War and some of them were part of ultra-secret military programmes. In addition, several of them were destroyed in the war, so we only know about them by reference.
Secondly, it is complicated to define what a computer is. If we use Alan Turing’s definition of a universal machine, a computer would be a programmable, general-purpose, fully automatic machine.
Starting from this premise, we will try to determine which of the various candidates in dispute had the honour of being the first computer in history.
ENIAC, the first electronic computer
During the Second World War, US Army gunners aimed their weapons using firing tables, which contained the trajectories that the projectiles could follow depending on the type of weapon, the geographical area or the direction and speed of the wind. These tables were made manually at the military base in Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Pennsylvania. Each table contained about three thousand trajectories, and each trajectory required about 750 calculations. Due to the large number of calculations to be made, the United States Army established an agreement with the University of Pennsylvania, where they are already working with early versions of computers, to help them produce these artillery fire tables.
Thus, in 1943, construction began on the first general-purpose computer based on electronic circuits, the ENIAC (acronym for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer).
The ENIAC was completed in 1945 and presented to the public on 15 February 1946. It was a “monster” weighing 27 tons, occupying a surface area of 167 m² and containing 17,500 vacuum valves, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and five million solder joints. The vacuum valves of the time were not particularly durable and when one of them melted, it left ENIAC totally inoperative. As most of these failures occurred during switching on or off, the decision was taken never to turn it off. With this simple trick they managed to reduce the failures to just one valve every two days, but at the cost of causing frequent blackouts in the city of Philadelphia, where the ENIAC was located, as its consumption was 160,000 W.
The ENIAC was programmable to perform any type of numerical calculation (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and square root), reaching 5,000 additions and 300 multiplications per second, which was revolutionary for the time. It did not have an operating system, nor any stored program, it only stored the numbers that it used in its operations. It used the decimal numbering system, instead of the current binary system and could handle numbers of up to 20 digits.
In the 10 years it was in operation, it performed everything from the above-mentioned calculations for the artillery firing tables, to complex physical calculations on the hydrogen bomb. In short, its designers, engineers John W. Mauchly and John Presper Eckert, were never candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize.
They were the ones who took the credit and fame, but it was six women (Betty Snyder Holberton, Jean Jennings Bartik, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum and Frances Bilas Spence) who programmed it… and fell into oblivion. They did not appear in the history books of computing until their hard work was rescued in the 1980s. Because ENIAC’s programming was not particularly easy. It required the manual operation of some 6,000 switches and the interconnection of the different modules by means of hose wires (similar to those used in old telephone switchboards), which allowed data to be passed from one module to another and thus to chain several calculations together. A modification in this “software” (if we can take the license to call it that) could require several weeks of work.
These women programmers laid the foundations for making programming easier and more accessible to everyone: they created the first set of routines, the first software applications and the first programming classes. Their work drastically changed the evolution of programming in the 1940s and 1950s.
The ENIAC marked a milestone in the history of computing and its architecture has even influenced today’s computers… but it was not the first.
Mark I, the first electromechanical computer in the USA
The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), better known as the Harvard Mark I or Mark I, was the first electromechanical computer in the United States, built at IBM headquarters and later sent to Harvard University in 1944, where it was presented on 7 August with great success.
The original concept had been presented to IBM by Howard Aiken in November 1937, based on the analytical machine that Charles Babbage had designed 100 years earlier and never managed to build. IBM began its development in 1939 and it took them almost 5 years to complete the work.
The Mark I was 15.5 metres long, 2.40 metres high and 60 centimetres deep, and weighed approximately five tonnes. It had 760,000 gears and 800 kilometres of cable inside. It operated with relays and was programmed with switches. It used electromagnetic signals to move the mechanical parts, which slowed down its calculations (it took between 0.3 and 0.5 seconds to perform a calculation). It could perform basic mathematical operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), which allowed it to perform complex equation calculations on parabolic motion. It read input data from punched paper ribbons and the results produced were printed using electric typewriters or card punchers. When the Mark I was in operation the noise it produced was similar to that of a room full of people typing in synchronisation.
The Mark I is considered to be a “general purpose computer”, i.e. it could be programmed to solve different problems at will. However, the programming capacity was limited. It was only possible to choose between several pre-programmed algorithms, as its work was basically restricted to the resolution of complex calculations relating to the parabolic motion of projectiles.
As a curious anecdote, thanks to his successor, the Mark II, the concept of the computer “bug” became popular. In 1947, engineers working with the Mark II detected an error in one of its relays. When they checked it, they found a dead moth stuck in the relay, so they stuck the insect in their logbook and labelled it as “the first real case of a bug* found”.
* In English, bug means “insect, bug”.
Just for the romantic detail of having made Babbage’s dream come true, the Mark I deserved a preeminent place in the History of Computer Science. In fact, for years it was considered to be the first computer in history, but only because its predecessors remained hidden by the fog of war, as they were built in Europe while the greatest battle in history was taking place.
Colossus, Winston Churchill’s best kept secret
With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the British Government brought its best scientists, including Alan Turing and Thomas H. Flowers, to Bletchley Park to decipher the messages of the Germans.
Turing designed an electromechanical device, called the Bombe, which in 1940 made it possible to decipher the signals encrypted by the German Enigma machine, which was used by various German combat units. The British were assisted in this by previous work carried out by Polish cryptologists, and even had a replica of Enigma made by them.
However, for high-level communications, Nazi Germany used the much more complex Lorenz SZ40/42 machine. And the British had never seen a Lorenz machine. Not even in photography. However, the British cryptographers at Bletchley Park were able to deduce the inner workings of the machine in January 1942. This was made possible by a mistake made by a German operator. On 30th August 1941 a message of 4,000 letters was transmitted, but the message was not correctly received from the other side, so the receiver sent a clear message requesting the retransmission of the original message. The message was retransmitted with the same key configuration (a forbidden practice) and contained small modifications, abbreviations, which allowed the coding made by the machine to be unraveled.
The British then set about trying to build a machine that could break the code of Lorenz’s machine. They first tried with an opto-mechanical comparison machine called “Heath Robinson” and then a team led by Thomas H. Flowers built the Colossus Mark I, a digital electronic computer that could be programmed by means of cable panels (like the later ENIAC), between February and December 1943.
Colossus Mark I was 2.25 metres high, 3 metres long and 1.20 metres wide. It had 1,500 vacuum valves (like the ENIAC), was fully automatic, allowed conditional jumps and even had memory. Its circuits allowed for arithmetic and Boolean operations in binary.
Colossus Mark I came into operation in January 1944 (seven months ahead of the Harvard Mark I) and successfully passed its first test with a real encrypted message. Shortly afterwards, Colossus Mark I was improved, and nine other improved machines were built, called Colossus Mark II, which even included parallel computing.
Colossus was a top-secret project that played a very important role in the development of the war. In fact, on 1 June 1944, it deciphered a message between Adolf Hitler and the German high command indicating that an Allied attack was expected in Calais. With this information, General Eisenhower decided on 6 June, as planned, to direct his troops to the Normandy coast, which meant the beginning of the end of World War II.
At the end of the war, Winston Churchill gave the direct order to destroy 8 of the 10 Colossus. Another survived until the 1950s and the last one was destroyed in 1960, after burning all its plans and circuit diagrams. The British government vetoed all information about the machine for 30 years, so Flowers never got the recognition he deserved. The reasons for this secrecy were not only military, but also political. One legend says that a German bombing of an English city could have been avoided thanks to Colossus, but that the Luftwaffe was allowed to act with impunity to protect its secret.
Colossus was the first machine that combined digital, electronic and programmable operation, although it was not a general-purpose computer, as it was designed specifically for cryptographic tasks. However, at that time not much importance was given to this aspect. Of course, this could cast doubt on its original position in the history of computing… if it were not for the existence of an earlier digital machine, which was totally programmable and general-purpose.
And the winner is…
The first general-purpose, automatic and fully programmable computer was neither the ENIAC, nor the Harvard Mark I, nor the Colossus. It was a very little-known machine, which has the name of a sports car, the Z3.
Konrad Zuse was a German engineer. During his engineering studies, Zuse had to perform many routine calculations by hand, which he found very boring. This led him to think of a machine that could perform such calculations. He started working on it in 1938, at his parents’ home in Berlin, until he managed to build the Z1, a binary mechanical calculator operated with electricity and limited programmability. The Z1 read instructions from a perforated tape. However, the Z1 never worked very well due to mechanical problems.
In 1939, Zuse was called up for military service, so the project was temporarily halted. However, he applied for a permit to continue the work and the Wehrmacht granted it, so that he was finally able to build the Z2. In September 1940, Zuse presented the Z2 in the living room of his parents’ house to experts from the German Aviation Research Institute (DVL). The Z2 was a revised version of the Z1 that used telephone relays instead of sheet metal. The DVL was impressed and contributed funds with which Zuse founded the company Zuse KG.
Thus, in 1941, the construction of the Z3 was completed, a programmable and fully automatic machine, i.e. the first computer built to be fully operational. The Z3 was basically a binary calculator based on telephone relays that could perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and square root operations, with purely binary floating-point arithmetic. The Z3, with electromechanical technology, weighed 1 ton. It was built with 2,300 relays, had a clock frequency of 5.33 Hz, and a word length of 22 bits. It allowed programming with loops, had memory for 64 words and a calculation unit.
On 12 May 1941, Konrad Zuse presented the Z3 to the DVL scientists, this time already in his company’s workshop in Berlin.
However, Zuse’s workshop, together with the Z3, was destroyed in an Allied air raid at the end of 1943 and his parents’ flat with the Z1 and Z2, and their original plans, was also destroyed on 30 January 1944. However, the Z4 successor, which Zuse had started to build in 1942 in new premises, remained intact… until 3 February 1945, when Allied air raids caused the partial destruction of the Z4 and the complete halt of Zuse’s development. The partially destroyed Z4 was packed up and moved to Göttingen on 14 February 1945. Work on the Z4 could not be resumed in post-war Germany and was not resumed until 1949. Finally, Konrad Zuse finished building the Z4, which became the first computer to be marketed in 1950, beating the British Ferranti Mark I by five months and the American UNIVAC I by ten months. Zuse’s work went largely unnoticed in the United Kingdom and the United States because of World War II. In fact, the first documented reference to Zuse’s work in the Anglo-Saxon world was the purchase of some of his patents by IBM in 1946.
The company Zuse KG was quite successful in selling computers and, during the 1960s, was able to work on a fully functional replica of the Z3, which is now part of the permanent exhibition at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. As for the original Z1, it was also rebuilt by Konrad Zuse himself, although he was almost given to life in it. Literally. In 1986, with the help of two engineering students, he began the reconstruction of the Z1 using some of the pieces from the original. Zuse suffered a heart attack in the middle of the project but managed to finish rebuilding the device in 1989. It cost 800,000 German marks (about 400,000 euros). Today the reconstructed Z1 is on display at the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin.
To get an idea of how revolutionary Zuse’s invention was, it is only necessary to briefly review some of its features:
• The first design of a programmable computer was made by Charles Babbage in the mid-19th century, but it could not be realized at that time. Partly because it was decimal, and therefore very complicated, not binary and simple like the Z3.
• If Ada Lovelace was the first theoretical programmer, writing programs for a machine that did not exist, then Konrad Zuse was the first practical programmer.
• The ENIAC was completed 4 years after the Z3. While the ENIAC used vacuum valves, the Z3 used relays. The ENIAC was still decimal and the Z3 was already binary.
• Until 1948, programming the ENIAC meant re-soldering the wires. The Z3 read the punch card programs.
• Today computers are based on transistors instead of valves or relays, but their internal architecture is more similar to the Z3 than to the ENIAC.
• The Z3 was a universal machine from Turing. It was possible to build loops on the Z3, but there were no conditional jump instructions (although it would have been easy to add one). However, there is a way to implement a Turing machine in a Z3 (assuming an infinite storage capacity), as was demonstrated in 1998 by Raúl Rojas. It is a strange way, but the Turing machine itself is strange, being designed to be simple and universal, not efficient.
This article is a tribute to the genius Konrad Zuse (22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995), a pioneer of computer science.
During the Second World War, US Army gunners aimed their weapons using firing tables, which contained the trajectories that the projectiles could follow depending on the type of weapon, the geographical area or the direction and speed of the wind. These tables were made manually at the military base in Aberdeen Proving Grounds, Pennsylvania. Each table contained about three thousand trajectories, and each trajectory required about 750 calculations. Due to the large number of calculations to be made, the United States Army established an agreement with the University of Pennsylvania, where they are already working with early versions of computers, to help them produce these artillery fire tables.
Thus, in 1943, construction began on the first general-purpose computer based on electronic circuits, the ENIAC (acronym for Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer).
The ENIAC was completed in 1945 and presented to the public on 15 February 1946. It was a “monster” weighing 27 tons, occupying a surface area of 167 m² and containing 17,500 vacuum valves, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and five million solder joints. The vacuum valves of the time were not particularly durable and when one of them melted, it left ENIAC totally inoperative. As most of these failures occurred during switching on or off, the decision was taken never to turn it off. With this simple trick they managed to reduce the failures to just one valve every two days, but at the cost of causing frequent blackouts in the city of Philadelphia, where the ENIAC was located, as its consumption was 160,000 W.
The ENIAC was programmable to perform any type of numerical calculation (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and square root), reaching 5,000 additions and 300 multiplications per second, which was revolutionary for the time. It did not have an operating system, nor any stored program, it only stored the numbers that it used in its operations. It used the decimal numbering system, instead of the current binary system and could handle numbers of up to 20 digits.
In the 10 years it was in operation, it performed everything from the above-mentioned calculations for the artillery firing tables, to complex physical calculations on the hydrogen bomb. In short, its designers, engineers John W. Mauchly and John Presper Eckert, were never candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize.
They were the ones who took the credit and fame, but it was six women (Betty Snyder Holberton, Jean Jennings Bartik, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum and Frances Bilas Spence) who programmed it… and fell into oblivion. They did not appear in the history books of computing until their hard work was rescued in the 1980s. Because ENIAC’s programming was not particularly easy. It required the manual operation of some 6,000 switches and the interconnection of the different modules by means of hose wires (similar to those used in old telephone switchboards), which allowed data to be passed from one module to another and thus to chain several calculations together. A modification in this “software” (if we can take the license to call it that) could require several weeks of work.
These women programmers laid the foundations for making programming easier and more accessible to everyone: they created the first set of routines, the first software applications and the first programming classes. Their work drastically changed the evolution of programming in the 1940s and 1950s.
The ENIAC marked a milestone in the history of computing and its architecture has even influenced today’s computers… but it was not the first.
The IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (ASCC), better known as the Harvard Mark I or Mark I, was the first electromechanical computer in the United States, built at IBM headquarters and later sent to Harvard University in 1944, where it was presented on 7 August with great success.
The original concept had been presented to IBM by Howard Aiken in November 1937, based on the analytical machine that Charles Babbage had designed 100 years earlier and never managed to build. IBM began its development in 1939 and it took them almost 5 years to complete the work.
The Mark I was 15.5 metres long, 2.40 metres high and 60 centimetres deep, and weighed approximately five tonnes. It had 760,000 gears and 800 kilometres of cable inside. It operated with relays and was programmed with switches. It used electromagnetic signals to move the mechanical parts, which slowed down its calculations (it took between 0.3 and 0.5 seconds to perform a calculation). It could perform basic mathematical operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division), which allowed it to perform complex equation calculations on parabolic motion. It read input data from punched paper ribbons and the results produced were printed using electric typewriters or card punchers. When the Mark I was in operation the noise it produced was similar to that of a room full of people typing in synchronisation.
The Mark I is considered to be a “general purpose computer”, i.e. it could be programmed to solve different problems at will. However, the programming capacity was limited. It was only possible to choose between several pre-programmed algorithms, as its work was basically restricted to the resolution of complex calculations relating to the parabolic motion of projectiles.
As a curious anecdote, thanks to his successor, the Mark II, the concept of the computer “bug” became popular. In 1947, engineers working with the Mark II detected an error in one of its relays. When they checked it, they found a dead moth stuck in the relay, so they stuck the insect in their logbook and labelled it as “the first real case of a bug* found”.
* In English, bug means “insect, bug”.
Just for the romantic detail of having made Babbage’s dream come true, the Mark I deserved a preeminent place in the History of Computer Science. In fact, for years it was considered to be the first computer in history, but only because its predecessors remained hidden by the fog of war, as they were built in Europe while the greatest battle in history was taking place.
Colossus, Winston Churchill’s best kept secret
With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the British Government brought its best scientists, including Alan Turing and Thomas H. Flowers, to Bletchley Park to decipher the messages of the Germans.
Turing designed an electromechanical device, called the Bombe, which in 1940 made it possible to decipher the signals encrypted by the German Enigma machine, which was used by various German combat units. The British were assisted in this by previous work carried out by Polish cryptologists, and even had a replica of Enigma made by them.
However, for high-level communications, Nazi Germany used the much more complex Lorenz SZ40/42 machine. And the British had never seen a Lorenz machine. Not even in photography. However, the British cryptographers at Bletchley Park were able to deduce the inner workings of the machine in January 1942. This was made possible by a mistake made by a German operator. On 30th August 1941 a message of 4,000 letters was transmitted, but the message was not correctly received from the other side, so the receiver sent a clear message requesting the retransmission of the original message. The message was retransmitted with the same key configuration (a forbidden practice) and contained small modifications, abbreviations, which allowed the coding made by the machine to be unraveled.
The British then set about trying to build a machine that could break the code of Lorenz’s machine. They first tried with an opto-mechanical comparison machine called “Heath Robinson” and then a team led by Thomas H. Flowers built the Colossus Mark I, a digital electronic computer that could be programmed by means of cable panels (like the later ENIAC), between February and December 1943.
Colossus Mark I was 2.25 metres high, 3 metres long and 1.20 metres wide. It had 1,500 vacuum valves (like the ENIAC), was fully automatic, allowed conditional jumps and even had memory. Its circuits allowed for arithmetic and Boolean operations in binary.
Colossus Mark I came into operation in January 1944 (seven months ahead of the Harvard Mark I) and successfully passed its first test with a real encrypted message. Shortly afterwards, Colossus Mark I was improved, and nine other improved machines were built, called Colossus Mark II, which even included parallel computing.
Colossus was a top-secret project that played a very important role in the development of the war. In fact, on 1 June 1944, it deciphered a message between Adolf Hitler and the German high command indicating that an Allied attack was expected in Calais. With this information, General Eisenhower decided on 6 June, as planned, to direct his troops to the Normandy coast, which meant the beginning of the end of World War II.
At the end of the war, Winston Churchill gave the direct order to destroy 8 of the 10 Colossus. Another survived until the 1950s and the last one was destroyed in 1960, after burning all its plans and circuit diagrams. The British government vetoed all information about the machine for 30 years, so Flowers never got the recognition he deserved. The reasons for this secrecy were not only military, but also political. One legend says that a German bombing of an English city could have been avoided thanks to Colossus, but that the Luftwaffe was allowed to act with impunity to protect its secret.
Colossus was the first machine that combined digital, electronic and programmable operation, although it was not a general-purpose computer, as it was designed specifically for cryptographic tasks. However, at that time not much importance was given to this aspect. Of course, this could cast doubt on its original position in the history of computing… if it were not for the existence of an earlier digital machine, which was totally programmable and general-purpose.
And the winner is…
The first general-purpose, automatic and fully programmable computer was neither the ENIAC, nor the Harvard Mark I, nor the Colossus. It was a very little-known machine, which has the name of a sports car, the Z3.
Konrad Zuse was a German engineer. During his engineering studies, Zuse had to perform many routine calculations by hand, which he found very boring. This led him to think of a machine that could perform such calculations. He started working on it in 1938, at his parents’ home in Berlin, until he managed to build the Z1, a binary mechanical calculator operated with electricity and limited programmability. The Z1 read instructions from a perforated tape. However, the Z1 never worked very well due to mechanical problems.
In 1939, Zuse was called up for military service, so the project was temporarily halted. However, he applied for a permit to continue the work and the Wehrmacht granted it, so that he was finally able to build the Z2. In September 1940, Zuse presented the Z2 in the living room of his parents’ house to experts from the German Aviation Research Institute (DVL). The Z2 was a revised version of the Z1 that used telephone relays instead of sheet metal. The DVL was impressed and contributed funds with which Zuse founded the company Zuse KG.
Thus, in 1941, the construction of the Z3 was completed, a programmable and fully automatic machine, i.e. the first computer built to be fully operational. The Z3 was basically a binary calculator based on telephone relays that could perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and square root operations, with purely binary floating-point arithmetic. The Z3, with electromechanical technology, weighed 1 ton. It was built with 2,300 relays, had a clock frequency of 5.33 Hz, and a word length of 22 bits. It allowed programming with loops, had memory for 64 words and a calculation unit.
On 12 May 1941, Konrad Zuse presented the Z3 to the DVL scientists, this time already in his company’s workshop in Berlin.
However, Zuse’s workshop, together with the Z3, was destroyed in an Allied air raid at the end of 1943 and his parents’ flat with the Z1 and Z2, and their original plans, was also destroyed on 30 January 1944. However, the Z4 successor, which Zuse had started to build in 1942 in new premises, remained intact… until 3 February 1945, when Allied air raids caused the partial destruction of the Z4 and the complete halt of Zuse’s development. The partially destroyed Z4 was packed up and moved to Göttingen on 14 February 1945. Work on the Z4 could not be resumed in post-war Germany and was not resumed until 1949. Finally, Konrad Zuse finished building the Z4, which became the first computer to be marketed in 1950, beating the British Ferranti Mark I by five months and the American UNIVAC I by ten months. Zuse’s work went largely unnoticed in the United Kingdom and the United States because of World War II. In fact, the first documented reference to Zuse’s work in the Anglo-Saxon world was the purchase of some of his patents by IBM in 1946.
The company Zuse KG was quite successful in selling computers and, during the 1960s, was able to work on a fully functional replica of the Z3, which is now part of the permanent exhibition at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. As for the original Z1, it was also rebuilt by Konrad Zuse himself, although he was almost given to life in it. Literally. In 1986, with the help of two engineering students, he began the reconstruction of the Z1 using some of the pieces from the original. Zuse suffered a heart attack in the middle of the project but managed to finish rebuilding the device in 1989. It cost 800,000 German marks (about 400,000 euros). Today the reconstructed Z1 is on display at the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin.
To get an idea of how revolutionary Zuse’s invention was, it is only necessary to briefly review some of its features:
• The first design of a programmable computer was made by Charles Babbage in the mid-19th century, but it could not be realized at that time. Partly because it was decimal, and therefore very complicated, not binary and simple like the Z3.
• If Ada Lovelace was the first theoretical programmer, writing programs for a machine that did not exist, then Konrad Zuse was the first practical programmer.
• The ENIAC was completed 4 years after the Z3. While the ENIAC used vacuum valves, the Z3 used relays. The ENIAC was still decimal and the Z3 was already binary.
• Until 1948, programming the ENIAC meant re-soldering the wires. The Z3 read the punch card programs.
• Today computers are based on transistors instead of valves or relays, but their internal architecture is more similar to the Z3 than to the ENIAC.
• The Z3 was a universal machine from Turing. It was possible to build loops on the Z3, but there were no conditional jump instructions (although it would have been easy to add one). However, there is a way to implement a Turing machine in a Z3 (assuming an infinite storage capacity), as was demonstrated in 1998 by Raúl Rojas. It is a strange way, but the Turing machine itself is strange, being designed to be simple and universal, not efficient.
This article is a tribute to the genius Konrad Zuse (22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995), a pioneer of computer science.