Konrad Zuse's Z3 was the world's first working programmable, fully automatic computing machine; whose attributes, with the addition of conditional branching, have often been the ones used as criteria in defining a computer. The Z3 was built with 2,000 relays. (A request for funding for an electronic successor was denied as "strategically unimportant" ("nicht kriegswichtig"). It had a clock frequency of ~5–10 Hz, and a word length of 22 bits. Calc...
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Konrad Zuse's Z3 was the world's first working programmable, fully automatic computing machine; whose attributes, with the addition of conditional branching, have often been the ones used as criteria in defining a computer. The Z3 was built with 2,000 relays. (A request for funding for an electronic successor was denied as "strategically unimportant" ("nicht kriegswichtig"). It had a clock frequency of ~5–10 Hz, and a word length of 22 bits. Calculations on the computer were performed in full binary floating point arithmetic. Z3 read programs off a punched film.
The machine was completed in 1941. On 12 May 1941, it was successfully presented to an audience of scientists (e.g. Prof. Alfred Teichmann, Prof. C. Schmieden) of the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt ("German Laboratory for Aviation"), in Berlin. The original Z3 was destroyed in 1943 during an Allied bombardment of Berlin. A fully functioning replica was built in the 1960s by the originator's company Zuse KG and is on...
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