Can't you just marvel at the achievement without worrying whether celebrating this could be seen as taking something away from somebody else?
Personally I don't care much who was first. There were others roughly around the same time trying similar things. It's the same with "who invented the airplane" and "who invented radio". Many countries lay claim to having been the first to do X or Y. I don't care much and I don't think anybody else should.
Zuse built an amazing machine. Does that not warrant a bit of respect?
Add that he had no help from the government or any big company. Does that still not warrant a bit of respect?
In my life I have "invented" quite a few algorithms that later turned out to be an old hat because smarter people had already invented them years or even decades earlier. To me that does not take away from my achievement :-)
It's not important whether you are the first one to achieve something.
It is important that you achieved it.
> I never understood this culture of envy in tech.
Eny seems to be one of humanities driving forces. If it was in tech only. I once passed through Gilroy in California which claims to be "Garlic Capital of the World" … and I visited Lautrec, where they already grew their (delicious) pink garlic since the middle ages. All I care for is taste, not quantity of production.
And let's not start to think about the various books of records, sigh. Or 100 places or things to do or visit before one dies?
Without knowing what's behind the link that says nothing. It could be comparing their achievements, the architectures or many things. You just (seem to?) interpret it in a certain way.
So this strikes to the heart of a frustration I have.
When I was younger, I took debates over "who invented X" at face value, based on how engaged and serious others were about them: That person alone had the idea first, all by themselves, and realized it.
As an adult of course I realize the world is much more complicated. By and large, inventions don't happen in a vacuum, they occur when their time has come. Knowledge/ideas/theory/precursors are floating about, often there is a community of people already engaged in the area, and then at best someone makes a notable contribution or excels at integration, often boosted by fortuitous circumstances.
Yet these topics are rarely if ever reported on that way. At most you get a "someone else had written about it already in a paper" + debate about the chances the inventor had known and read about the paper (I think for Zuse this is the debate about whether he had read Turing or not).
For examples like this I'd love to read a more nuanced piece that takes me into the inventor's world first: What were the hot topics of their day? What devices were known to them already? Who were they in contact with? What inspired them? What allowed them to get organized and pursue a particular path? etc.
More often than not invention is a long process that involves multiple heads and years to decades.
I think I want a book like "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes, which really excels at sketching the milieu of first-half 20th century physics, but with Turing, von Neumann, Zuse, etc. instead ...
> I think for Zuse this is the debate about whether he had read Turing or not
In his own words:
I started in 1934, working independently and without knowledge of other developments going on around me. In fact, I hadn't even heard of Charles Babbage when I embarked on my work.
There's another interesting tidbit: John von Neumann lived in Berlin 1926-1929 and was a lecturer at Zuse's university. Contact has not been reported, and Zuse was at highschool for most of that time, but they may have crossed paths, or at least there may have been indirect intellectual influence via the surroundings Zuse studied in subsequently.
It's stunning (and sad) sometimes just how much of the modern world was about to reveal itself in the academic communities of Berlin of the 20s and 30s before facism tore it asunder.
The claims made on that web page are true. There have been several attempts to rebuild one of his machines. One of them used to be shown in the Technikmuseum in Berlin, but apparently it has been moved to the Konrad Zuse Museum in Hünich.
The machine used binary arithmetic and could do floating point addition (0.8 seconds) and multiplication (3 seconds) and had 64 22-bit words of memory. It's actually quite a technological marvel considering it was built in the war and he had trouble getting the materials to build it as military projects were prioritized and the Nazis didn't consider his machine important for the war effort.
If you ever visit Berlin, especially with kids, the city has a lovely Technology Museum with an computer section that also features Zuse replicas and gear, including a replica of the still-mechanical Z1. I think Zuse himself made and donated it to the museum.
I absolutely love the giant honking hand-crank you can manually turn to make it go.
As a child seeing the mechanical Z1 really drove home for me that computers are understandable and not magic, literally breaking what they do down into little managable parts and steps and the art of making a computer is in sizing (how many adders do you need?) and arrangement (how can you make it produce results faster?).
With some erudite commentary and informed pointing-at-things I think you have a good chance to recreate that revelation for your kids too.
One thing that struck me about the Z1 was how closely it paralleled things I'd expect to see in a silicon implementation of a CPU:
I recall seeing: different physical blocks for different logic, a big regular blog for the memory and other blocks for ALU, etc, addressing handled by column and row selection lines, evaluating bit values by putting a signal onto the data line and seeing whether the value changes...
But all implemented with mechanical linkages (so a signal is a pull of a rod, a connection is a hooking of a rod onto some other linkage, etc.
The claim that the Z3 computer was Turing-complete is not true. There is a paper arguing for it, but a detailed reading of it shows that this is an extremely far-fetched and somewhat disingenuous stretch. (The disingenuous part is because any fixed-function calculator could then be claimed to be "Turing-complete", not just the Z3). The central point of the Church-Turing thesis is that a finite set of instructions, given an unlimited memory to work with, can perform any calculation we can imagine (where the "can imagine" part makes the thesis philosophical). The "finite set of instructions" is indispensable, however, since if the instructions are unlimited, you can simply encode any answer you want into them. The "Turing" mode of Z3, which was of course never used, involves a program which essentially scales in length with the total number of calculations it will perform - or even the exponential of that number, if there are many branches - which is not a good model of a Turing machine.
Of course, no computer is a true Turing machine, since the memory is always limited, but our computers are a useful physical approximation of a Turing machine because a small program can compute using a large memory. The Z3 is not that type of a device at all.
If a computer can emulate another computer that is known to be Turing complete then it must itself be considered Turing complete. One thing we must decide is if we allow the addition of memory that the first machine didn't have originally. For example, an Apple ][ can emulate a modern PC (at a tiny fraction of the speed) if we can add a card with a few GB of RAM to it.
A very simple Von Neumann style computer is the ByteByteJump. It has a single instruction (so no op code) with 3 address fields and it copies a single byte from the first address to the second address and then always jumps to the third address. If the addresses are 3 bytes long then every instruction takes up 9 bytes in memory. You can do math and logic operations by setting up 16KB tables in memory and then patching an instruction so the two operands are the bottom two bytes of the first address. To subtract the byte in address 0x001234 from the byte in address 0x00C0F0 and store the result in address 0x003333 on a little endian BBJ with a subtraction table at 0xD00000 you could use this sequence:
There are several ways of implementing conditional jumps by patching the value of the third address.
Could the Z3 emulate this machine if given a 16MB memory it could interface to? Its instruction tape could be made into an infinite loop, which is good enough for this application. There are no other jumps or conditional execution in the emulator.
If you do need conditional execution to emulate a Turing complete machine (the Game Of Life, for example) then you might get by with conditional assignment instead. If the value of B is either 0 or 1, then Z:=A*B+C(1-B) will assign either A or C to Z. I am not familiar enough with the Z3 but would be surprised if it can't even do that.
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