History of computing

   In 1936, working in isolation in Nazi Germany, Konrad Zuse began work on his first calculator Series Z, with memory and (still limited) possibility of programming. Created mainly for mechanical basis, but on the basis of binary logic, model Z1, completed in 1938, and it does not work reliably, because of the lack of precision of parts.

   The next car Zuse - Z3, completed in 1941. It was based on telephone relays and did work satisfactorily. Thus, Z3 is the first working computer program-controlled. In many respects the Z3 was similar to modern machines, pioneering numerous advances, such as floating point numbers. Replacing the complex in the implementation of the decimal system to binary, made the machines Zuse easier and, hence, more reliable, it is believed that this is one of the reasons why Zuse succeeded where Babbage failed.

   Programs were fed into Z3 on punched films. Conditional transitions are absent, but in 1990 it was proved theoretically that Z3 a universal computer (if you ignore the restrictions on the size of physical memory). In the two patents in 1936, Konrad Zuse mentioned that machine instructions could be stored in the same memory as the data - thus foresaw what later became known as the von Neumann architecture and was first implemented only in 1949 in the British EDSAC.