Z3

(computer)The third computer designed and built by Konrad Zuse and the first digital computer to successfully runreal programs. The computer was ready in 1941, five yearsbefore ENIAC.

Zuse began his work on program-driven calculating machines in1935. His two predessors of the Z3, the Z1 and Z2, wereunsuccessful mechanical calculating machines. The Z3 wasdelivered to the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt f?r Luftfahrt(German Experimental Department of Aeronautics) in Berlin andwas used for deciphering coded messages. A 1960reconstruction of the Z3 is in the Deutsche Museum in Munich.

The Z3 used about 2600 relays of the kind used intelecommunications. Zuse wrote and implemented the languagePlankalk?l on the Z3. Programs were punched into cinefilm.

Zuse built some more computers after World War II, includingthe Z3's successor, the Z4, which was set up at ETH Zurich,Switzerland.

Of the potential rival claimants to the title of firstprogrammable computer, Babbage (UK, c1840) planned but wasnot able to build a decimal, programmable machine.Atanasoff's ABC, completed in 1942 was a special purposecalculator, like those of Pascal (1640) and Leibniz(1670). Eckert and Mauchly's ENIAC (US), as originallyreleased in 1946, was programmable only by manual rewiring or,in 1948, with switches. None of these machines was freelyprogrammable. Neither was Turing et al.'s Colossus (UK,1943-45). Aiken's MARK I (1944) was programmable butstill decimal, without separation of storage and control.

http://cs.tu-berlin.de/~zuse.

http://epemag.com/zuse.