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The Z3 was built with 2200 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 that year, it was successfully presented to an audience of scientists in Berlin). The original Z3 was destroyed in 1944Events World War II January January 4 The Battle of Monte Cassino begins. January 5 Murder of Danish playwright Kaj Munck January 17 British forces, in Italy, cross the Garigliano River. January 20 The Royal Air Force drops 2,300 tons of bombs on Berlin; during an Allied bombardment of Berlin. A fully functioning replica was built in the 1960sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s Years: 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 Events and trends The 1960s was a turbulent decade of change around by the originator's company Zuse KG and is on permanent display in the Deutsches MuseumThe Deutsches Museum is based in Munich. It was founded on June 28, 1903, on a meeting of the German Association of Engineers as an initiative of Oskar von Miller. It was called: "German Society of the Museum for Masterpieces of Natural Science and Techno. In 19981998 was a common year starting on Thursday (see link for calendar), and was designated the International Year of the Ocean''. Events January January 1998 A massive ice storm, caused by El Nino, strikes New England, southern Ontario and Quebec, resulting the Z3 was proven to be Turing-complete.
The following list tries to place the Z3 in the context of previous and later work:
1. Unlike the first non-programmable computer built by Wilhelm SchickardWilhelm Schickard (born 1592 in Herrenberg died 1635 in Tubingen) built the first automatic calculator in 1623. This makes him the father of the computing era, and one of the most remarkable figures in recorded history. Contemporaries called his machine t in 1623Events August 6 Pope Urban VIII is elected to the Papacy. Change of emperor of the Ottoman Empire from Osman II (1618- 1622) to Murat IV ( 1623- 1640). The Safavids recapture Baghdad. England first colonizes Saint Kitts and Nevis. Wilhelm Schickard invent, the Z3 of 1941 was program-controlled.
2. The success of Zuse's Z3 is often attributed to its use of the simple binary system. This was invented roughly 3 centuries earlier by Gottfried Leibniz; Boole later used it to develop his Boolean algebra. In 1937, a master's thesis of Claude Shannon of MIT mapped Boolean algebra onto electronic relays in his seminal work on digital circuit design. Nevertheless, Zuse was the one who put it all together and made it work on the program-controlled Z3.
3. The first design of a program-controlled computer was due to Charles Babbage in the mid 1800s. This design, however, could not be realized back then, presumably because it was decimal and therefore rather complicated, not binary and simple like the Z3. (In 1991, however, working from Babbage's original plans, a reconstruction of his Difference Engine was completed, and functioned well.) And if Babbage's friend Ada Lovelace was the first theoretical programmer, writing programs for a machine that did not exist, then Zuse was the first practical programmer.
4. The ENIAC was completed 4 years after the Z3. ENIAC used tubes to implement switches, Z3 used relays. ENIAC was still decimal, Z3 was already binary. Until 1948, to program ENIAC actually meant to rewire it; while the Z3 read programs off a tape (actually a punched film). Today's computers are based on transistors instead of tubes or relays; their basic architecture, however, is much more similar to Z3's than to ENIAC's.
5. 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.
6. Relation between the Z3 and the theoretical concept of a universal Turing machine: It was possible to construct loops on the Z3, but there was no conditional jump instruction (although it would have been rather straight-forward to insert one). Nevertheless, there is a way of implementing a universal Turing machine on a Z3 (assuming unlimited storage and zero crashing probability), as was shown in 1998. It is an awkward way, but the Turing machine itself is an awkward device, designed to be simple and universal, not efficient.
From a pragmatic point of view, however, it is 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 --, and that in many pioneering ways it was quite similar to modern computers.