Z3 (computer) - Relation To Other Work

Relation To Other Work

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 introduced the idea of mapping Boolean algebra onto electronic relays in a seminal work on digital circuit design. Zuse however did not know Shannon's work and developed the groundwork independently.

Zuse's coworker Helmut Schreyer built an electronic digital experimental model of a computer using 100 vacuum tubes in 1942, but it was lost at the end of the war.

The United Kingdom's 10 codebreaking Colossus computers (1943) were among the first electronic digital computers, other than the one-off Atanasoff–Berry Computer (1942). They used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) and binary representation of numbers. Programming was by means of re-plugging patch panels and setting switches. This development was kept secret for many decades which led to claims of "firsts" in computing that later turned out to be incorrect.

The ENIAC was completed after the war. It used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes) to implement switches, and decimal representation for numbers. Until 1948 programming was, as for Colossus, by patch leads and switches.

The Manchester Baby of 1948 and the EDSAC of 1949 were the world's first computers with internally stored programs. They implemented a concept frequently (but erroneously) attributed to a 1945 paper of John von Neumann and colleagues. Von Neumann's own papers give proper credit to Alan Turing, and the concept had actually been mentioned earlier by Konrad Zuse himself, in a 1936 patent application (which was rejected).