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Konrad Zuse's Z3, completed in Berlin in 1941, is regarded as the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. It calculated with about 2,600 relays, switches worked by electricity, and read its programs from holes punched in strips of film.

Berlin, 1941

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The story behind the card

Zuse (1910–1995) was a civil engineer whose first job, at an aircraft factory, meant doing many routine calculations by hand, which led him to design machines to do them. From 1936 he built computers in his parents' flat in Berlin. His first, the Z1, was purely mechanical and unreliable; the Z3 used relays instead. It used binary numbers, made only of 0s and 1s, which suit switches that are either on or off, and floating-point arithmetic, a way of handling very large and very small numbers. It helped with calculations on wing flutter, a dangerous vibration in aircraft wings. The original was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid on Berlin on 21 December 1943, but Zuse's company built a working replica in 1961, now in the Deutsches Museum in Munich. In 1998 the computer scientist Raúl Rojas showed that the Z3 could, in principle, compute anything a modern computer can.

Türkçe oku
Konrad Zuse'nin 1941'de Berlin'de tamamladığı Z3, çalışan ilk programlanabilir ve tam otomatik dijital bilgisayar kabul edilir. Hesaplarını elektrikle açılıp kapanan yaklaşık 2.600 röleyle yapar, programlarını film şeritlerine açılmış deliklerden okurdu.
Berlin, 1941

Zuse (1910–1995) inşaat mühendisiydi. Bir uçak fabrikasında çalışırken aynı türden hesapları elle yapmak zorundaydı; bu hesapları makineye yaptırma fikri buradan doğdu. 1936'dan itibaren Berlin'de, ailesinin evinde bilgisayar yaptı. İlk makinesi Z1 tamamen mekanikti ve güvenilir çalışmıyordu; bu yüzden Z3'te röleye geçti. Z3, yalnızca 0 ve 1'den oluşan ikili sayılarla çalışıyordu; bu sistem, ya açık ya kapalı olan anahtarlara çok uygundur. Çok büyük ve çok küçük sayılarla işlem yapmayı sağlayan kayan noktalı aritmetiği de kullanıyordu. Makine, uçak kanatlarında görülen tehlikeli bir titreşim olan kanat çırpıntısı üzerine yapılan hesaplara yardım etti. Özgün Z3, 21 Aralık 1943'te Müttefiklerin Berlin'i bombalaması sırasında yok oldu; ama Zuse'nin şirketi 1961'de çalışan bir kopyasını yaptı. Bu kopya bugün Münih'teki Deutsches Museum'da sergileniyor. 1998'de bilgisayar bilimci Raúl Rojas, Z3'ün ilke olarak bugünkü bilgisayarların yapabildiği her hesabı yapabileceğini gösterdi.

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Background reading: Z3 (computer)
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