![]() ![]() This computer was absolutely huge and filled a room that was 55 feet long by 8 feet high. At Harvard, the first of the MARK series computers were being built. Much of the focus was on making rockets and ballistics more precise- which required complex calculations. At major universities across America, many scientists and mathematicians worked hard on innovating new ways to keep up with the technology that was quickly advancing. ![]() ![]() With World War II blazing on, the US government realized that it needed to be more innovative than ever in order to gain the upper hand. In those days most business machines used punched paper, however in Germany at the time, paper was extremely expensive. It even included storage which used tape in the form of old movie reels. The Z3 was programmed with a binary floating point number and switching system. The Z2 was the first fully functioning electro- magnetic computer and the Z3 was the first fully electronic and digital computer that included the ability to be programmed. The innovations to his computers were quite important. In later additions of his Zuse computer, Konrad Zuse created the Z2 and Z3. Zuse’s Z1 was created with a focus on 3 basic elements that are still necessary in today’s calculators- it is necessary to have a control, it is necessary to have a memory to store results of each step and it is necessary to perform calculations. Zuse found that one of the most difficult aspects of completing large calculations on the calculation devices of the day (a slide rule or mechanical adding machine) was the ability to keep track of the many results that would then have to be recomputed to give a final answer. Many would see Zuse’s Z1 as the first of a long line of calculators. Konrad Zuse was a German whose claim to fame is the creation of the first freely programmable mechanical computing device in 1936. While there was no single person that is widely credited with inventing the computer, many view Konrad Zuse and his Z1 machine as the first in a long line of innovations that have given us the computer with a cheap ultrawide monitor today. ![]()
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