z3

1 definition found

z3 - Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (26 May 2007) :

  Z3
  
     <computer> The third computer designed and built by Konrad Zuse
      and the first digital computer to successfully run
     real programs.  The computer was ready in 1941, five years
     before ENIAC.
  
     Zuse began his work on program-driven calculating machines in
     1935.  His two predessors of the Z3, the Z1 and Z2, were
     unsuccessful mechanical calculating machines.  The Z3 was
     delivered to the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt fur Luftfahrt
     (German Experimental Department of Aeronautics) in Berlin and
     was used for deciphering coded messages.  A 1960
     reconstruction of the Z3 is in the Deutsche Museum in Munich.
  
     The Z3 used about 2600 relays of the kind used in
     telecommunications.  Zuse wrote and implemented the language
     Plankalkul on the Z3.  Programs were punched into cinefilm.
  
     Zuse built some more computers after World War II, including
     the Z3's successor, the Z4, which was set up at ETH Zurich,
     Switzerland.
  
     Of the potential rival claimants to the title of first
     programmable computer, Babbage (UK, c1840) planned but was
     not able to build a decimal, programmable machine.
     Atanasoff's ABC, completed in 1942 was a special purpose
     calculator, like those of Pascal (1640) and Leibniz
     (1670).  Eckert and Mauchly's ENIAC (US), as originally
     released in 1946, was programmable only by manual rewiring or,
     in 1948, with switches.  None of these machines was freely
     programmable.  Neither was Turing et al.'s Colossus (UK,
     1943-45).  Aiken's MARK I (1944) was programmable but
     still decimal, without separation of storage and control.
  
     [Features?  Where was it designed?  Contemporaries?]
  
     (http://cs.tu-berlin.de/~zuse).
  
     (http://epemag.com/zuse).
  
     (2003-10-01)