Everything about Z3 Computer totally explained
Konrad Zuse's
Z3 was the first working
programmable, fully automatic computing
machine; whose attributes, with the addition of conditional branching, have often been the ones used as criteria in defining a
computer. The Z3 was built with 2,000
relays, had a
clock frequency of ~5–10
Hz, and a
word length of 22
bits. Calculations on the computer were performed in full
binary floating point arithmetic.
The machine was completed in 1941. On
May 12, 1941, it was successfully presented to an audience of scientists
of the DVL (Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt, for example German Laboratory for Aviation), in
Berlin. The original Z3 was destroyed in 1943 during an Allied bombardment of Berlin. A fully functioning replica was built in the 1960s by the originator's company
Zuse KG and is on permanent display in the
Deutsches Museum. In 1998 the Z3 was proven to be
Turing-complete.
The Z3 was used by the Nazi government's German Aircraft Research Institute to perform statistical analyses of wing flutter in aircraft design.
How the Z3 relates to other work
Unlike the first
non-programmable computer built by
Wilhelm Schickard in 1623, the Z3 of 1941 was program-controlled.
The success of Zuse's Z3 is often attributed to its use of the simple binary system. This was invented roughly three centuries earlier by
Gottfried Leibniz;
Boole later used it to develop his
Boolean algebra. In 1937,
Claude Shannon of
MIT introduced the idea of mapping Boolean algebra onto electronic relays in a seminal work on
digital circuit design (see also
Z1). Nevertheless, Zuse (who didn't know Shannon's work) was the one who put the ideas together and made it work on the program-controlled Z3.
The first
design of a program-controlled computer was
Charles Babbage's
Analytical Engine in the 1830s.
The
ENIAC was completed 5 years after the Z3. ENIAC used
vacuum tubes to implement switches, Z3 used
relays
(a request for funding for an electronic successor was denied as "strategically unimportant"). ENIAC was decimal, Z3 was binary. Until 1948, to program ENIAC actually meant to rewire it; while the Z3 read programs off a tape (actually a punched
film).
Z3 needed an
external tape to store its program. The
Manchester Baby of 1948 and the
EDSAC of 1949 were the world's first computers with
internally stored programs, implementing a concept frequently attributed to a 1945
paper of
John von Neumann and colleagues. A patent application of Konrad Zuse, however, mentioned this concept almost a decade earlier in 1936, although the patent was rejected.
Relation to the concept of a universal Turing machine
It was possible to construct loops on the Z3, but there was no conditional jump instruction. Nevertheless, there's a way of implementing a universal
Turing machine on a Z3, as was shown in 1998. Rojas concludes, "We can therefore say that, from an abstract theoretical perspective, the computing model of the Z3 is equivalent to the computing model of today's computers. From a practical perspective, and in the way the Z3 was really programmed, it wasn't equivalent to modern computers."
From a pragmatic point of view, however, it's much more relevant that the Z3 provided a quite
practical instruction set for the typical engineering applications of the 1940s—Zuse was a
civil engineer who only started to build his computers to facilitate his work in his main profession.
Further Information
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