Zuse Completes Z3: World's First Digital Computer Born
Konrad Zuse completed the Z3 computer in Berlin on May 12, 1941, making it the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. The machine used 2,600 telephone relays for its arithmetic and control units, with program instructions read from punched celluloid film. It could perform addition in 0.8 seconds and multiplication in 3 seconds. The Z3 was used by the German Aircraft Research Institute to perform statistical analyses of wing flutter. Zuse requested government funding to build an electronic version, but the Nazi regime deemed it "not war-important." Allied bombing destroyed the original Z3 in 1943. Zuse rebuilt it in 1961, and a 1998 analysis proved the Z3 was Turing-complete, capable in principle of computing anything a modern computer can.
May 12, 1941
85 years ago
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