Computing didn't start with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. In fact some claim it began in the 1930s in Germany, with a giant letter Z - as in Zuse, specifically Konrad Zuse. There's strong evidence that he built the world's first computer in Berlin.
It's a trivia question that awakens disbelief in American computer science students. The computer was invented in Germany? Inconceivable, but it's apparently true.
On June 22, museums celebrated the 100th birthday of computer pioneer Konrad Zuse, drawing attention to his astounding work. In 1936, 26-year-old Zuse put together a computer in his Berlin apartment. His machine was as tall as a bunk bed and bucked when the mechanical shifting links jammed up. And yet almost everything a modern computer needs was there. Zuse named his invention the Z1.
Perhaps he'd have become richer than Bill Gates if he'd had similar marketing options available to him. But Konrad Zuse, a trained civil engineer with a bent for architecture and mechanical engineering, lived in Nazi Germany. By the time he had improved his first computer into the Z3 - the world's first functional digital computer - it was May 1941 and the war had already begun.
This meant that Zuse had no contact with Britain or the United States, where scientists working at large companies were also already tinkering with computers. The inventor remained on his own, earning his money as an engineer with Berlin's Henschel airplane company. The tedious calculation work on flight statistics only strengthened his desire to create a machine to handle the drudge work. "I'm too lazy to calculate," was Zuse's humorous way of justifying his inventive drive.
He privately founded Zuse-Apparate-Bau, the world's first computer company, in Berlin. But in 1945 a bomb fell on the company's premises and the Z3 was destroyed. Its successor, the Z4, was unfinished. Konrad Zuse tried a new start in West Germany.
It was a time that Horst Zuse, his oldest son (born in 1945), remembers well. As a small boy, he was allowed to take home pieces of scrap from his father's computer company, now in Hessen. "I built those pieces into my Maerklin model train set," he says today with a laugh. "If my father had known just how many electric shocks I'd received, he'd surely have forbidden it."
Konrad Zuse was a father like many others during those days of economic rebuilding. He worked 16 hours a day and saw his children only sporadically. "He lived humbly and tended to be reserved," his son remembers. Yet he set the tone for the family.
Given his first attempts with the Maerklin trains, it's no wonder that Horst Zuse later studied electrical engineering and became a professor of computer science. It's only been in recent years that he's truly come to grips with his father's achievements. At 64 he build a replica of the destroyed Z3 computer from 1941 for the Museum of Technology and can only tip his hat to his dad. "It's a wonderful architecture for a machine: very few components and highly abstract," he says.
Not that any of it particularly benefited Konrad Zuse. His company in Hessen was never an economic success. Competitors in the US and Germany quickly caught up to him in the area of computers, and in 1967 Siemens acquired the debt-stricken Zuse company.
His father was naturally very sad that so little came of his ideas, Horst Zuse remembers. Konrad Zuse would come to rely on gallows humour to stay sane, describing himself as a "recognised improver of the world." When he was an old man, he produced a replica of the destroyed Z1 for Berlin's Museum of Technology and painted - perhaps not coincidentally - a portrait of Bill Gates.
"It would have brought tears to my father's eyes to experience the attention accorded to such things today," his son says. In this year of celebration of Zuse's birth, exhibits are being opened in several German cities, including Berlin and Dresden.
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