12 ms·

Konrad Zuse and the digital revolution he started 75 years ago

151 points by mh-cx 10y ago

pieter1976 10y ago
Good to see Zuse on HN. It's possible to go and see his machines in Germany and I highly recommend it. This is a "forgotten" part of computing history because of WWII and deserves the light of day.
- mh-cx 10y ago
  Agree. The Z3 is exhibited at the Deutsches Museum in Munich: http://www.deutsches-museum.de/en/exhibitions/communication/computers/universal-computers/ http://www.deutsches-museum.de/en/exhibitions/communication/... Here's the Z3 in action (German only, try subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUXnhVrT4CI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUXnhVrT4CI
  - c7h 10y ago
    I can highly recommend a visit there. Not only you can see an original Z4 and a replica of the Z3, but also lot's of more science and history related exhibitions. Don't miss the Enigma!
    - ptaipale 10y ago
      Among the more impressive specimens, you can also see an A4 rocket (better known as V2).
  - jdietrich 10y ago
    The Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin has a reconstruction of the Z1. http://www.sdtb.de/Mathematics-and-Computer-Science.1256.0.html http://www.sdtb.de/Mathematics-and-Computer-Science.1256.0.h...
  - lorenzhs 10y ago
    Z22 is at ZKM in Karlsruhe, but Deutsches Museum has a whole department on Z3 and related machines. I can highly recommend it to anyone interested in (very) early computers!
- elcapitan 10y ago
  One funny detail I read about those machines is that he had to steal (due to war shortages) copper cables from public telephone lines, which could have lead to death penalty (because of sabotage).
- jgrahamc 10y ago
  Also seems Turing and Zuse probably met in 1947: http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/Images/Turing_Zuse.pdf http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/Images/Turing_Zus...
  - elcapitan 10y ago
    The article makes it sound like he waterboarded him, but that's probably just because the word 'interrogate' has become so unpredictably uncivilized in recent usage.
    - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
      It seems like there was probably a degree of duress and that this was a continuation of a series of "interrogations" where perhaps a greater deal of duress was necessary? Not that the German scientists were necessarily unwilling but that they were anyway required to attend: >"As the behaviour towards German scientists had already improved considerably in 1947,the interrogation had the more elegant form of a small colloquium. A handful of German specialists from Göttingen had been invited among them also myself. The significant German people who there gave talks were Professor Alwin Walther who had been thoroughly concerned with Hollerith machines and differential analyzers at the Darmstadt Institute of Technology, and Konrad Zuse with his relay calculators. If in addition Professor Friedrich Willers from Dresden had also participated, all leading German scientists who have been busy during the war in the development of sequence controlled calculating machines would have been there. Though Willers was in the Soviet occupation zone and therefore probably not available for the Britons." (http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/Images/Turing_Zuse.pdf http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/Images/Turing_Zus...) // Note that Porter from the NPL later mentions performing an "investigation" as part of a military operation, in his military uniform (despite there being no requirement to do so). Also: >"Undoubtedly, the participation at the colloquium of Göttingen was not optional. (ibid, p.5)" tl;dr - It sounds like there's evidence to suggest Turing had an unreported meeting with Zuse in 1948. There is also a suspicion that Turing could have met with Zuse in 1934 on a trip to Gottingen.
      - 10y ago
tiatia 10y ago
Konrad Who?
- kuschku 10y ago
  The person who invented the computer. Which somehow no US school teaches about. He also developed a very awesome high-level language very early on.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Charles Babbage is as far as I know the uncontested inventor of the computer, which somehow even German schools teach about.
    - mh-cx 10y ago
      Was it Turing complete? Because Zuse's Z3 was. I'm not saying though, that this is a criteria for calling any machine a computer. But it's probably what sets Zuse's achievement apart. UPDATE: I've just learned that Babbage's language was also Turing complete. So Zuse's achievement is solely having physically built the first working computer, while Babbage's machine was never realized.
      - elcapitan 10y ago
        Babbage invented the concept of the programmable computer, Zuse built a programmable electronic computer, which could later be shown to be turing-complete. Those things are pretty subtle, and the 'national' version is always the least subtle, I guess ;) Leonardo da Vinci also invented tanks and helicopters, and then it took a couple of hundred years to build some.
        lugus35 10y ago
        And Pascal invented the calculator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_calculator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_calculator
porsupah 10y ago
Minor trivia - one of the TRON: Legacy writers confirmed to me on Twitter that the character "Zuse" was indeed named in honor of the gentleman in question.
jdietrich 10y ago
Zuse is an interesting example of history being written by the victors. Ask any German who invented the computer and they'll tell you it was Konrad Zuse, but he is almost completely unknown elsewhere. Turing did brilliant work, but Zuse did the job of Turing and Tommy Flowers, working in isolation with very limited resources.
- cmarschner 10y ago
  As can be seen on Wikipedia: [1] vs. [2] - the English version of "computer science" does not mention Zuse. Time to change? Similarly, the German version of "Computer" mentions Zuse 20 times [3]; the English version starts describing the Z2 [4]. Quite fascinating how Wikipedia is written through the local lense. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatik#Entwicklung_moderner_Rechenmaschinen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatik#Entwicklung_moderne... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science [3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer#Electromechanical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer#Electromechanical
  - wslh 10y ago
    Excellent catch! I love Wikipedia with all their faults but probably we need not so difficult to build tools to recognize anomalies between Wikipedia cultures... sorry, languages.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - a3n 10y ago
    English and German sources are more likely to be accessible to people working in English and German, respectively, and less in the reverse. And Wikepedia is all about sources. So not surprising, but worth fixing.
- schlowmo 10y ago
  > "Zuse is an interesting example of history being written by the victors." This may hold true for the Zuse story, but he's also an example for german history about german scientists. While the Wikipedia article (both german and english) mentioning his ties to the NS and the german defence industry of that time, you probably find no hint about that at universities where lecture halls are named after him. For example in Hamburg, where the only "real" lecture hall at the CS department is named after him. In the small exhibition about his scientific life beneath this lecture hall you don't find a word about that (at least the last time I was there).
mafribe 10y ago
Also of interest are some of his other innovations: - Plankalkuel, by some criteria the first high-level programming language [1]. - Digital physics [2]. I have no idea if this is taken seriously by physicists. - First chess program, predating Wiener, Shannon and Turing [3]. - First implementation of floating point numbers [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalkül https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalkül [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_Space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_Space [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess#Chronology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess#Chronology [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#History
- TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
  Amazing work. >The original notation was two dimensional. (!)
marktangotango 10y ago
Throwing a mention of Atanosoff at Iowa State university in here, who's contributions were significant, but little known.
zer00eyz 10y ago
The history of computing is filled with so many names, and odd or tangled stories, this is one that I was un-aware of, and is super interesting. If you like these strange connections you should go and read about the Jacquard loom, that was using punch cards to control the patterns produced! It can be argued that "programmability" came before general purpose computing...
ericssmith 10y ago
"And, thanks to Konrad Zuse, computers and computer networks are what we have." Holy smokes, what an inaccurate statement. Arguably one of the obstacles to progress in technology is due the persistence of the fundamental computer design that has been employed since "Baby" ran its first program just before lunch on June 21, 1948, including an approach to fast random memory accesses. This approach was novel, based on CRTs used in radar. Most everything else -- design-wise -- was from the Moore School Lectures of 1946. And the really inspirational part of those was from the work on the ENIAC. The missing piece that needs to be more generally appreciated is how the early work on practical, general-purpose computers was quietly done in England while the Americans were squabbling over who was first.
eternalban 10y ago
Someone mentioned the V2 here. Interesting contrast between post-war careers of Von Brown and Zuse.
jcrawfordor 10y ago
So, Zuse's development were indeed important, but the Zuse Z3 had in important limitation that the article doesn't mention, which leads some people to not count it as "first": The Z3 was largely not Turing complete. This is because the Z3 had no conditional branching. In 1998 it was shown that the Z3 actually didn't need conditional branching, and it was Turing complete but only because it is possible to unroll conditional statements into a version where both branches are evaluated and then the result of one is cancelled. However, at the time of the Z3's development and use, this wasn't known. So while the Z3 is indeed an important early computer, it shares a significant discontinuity with modern computing that reflects the time. The Z3 was not intended as a "computer" in the modern sense, it was more of a calculating machine that could perform repeat arithmetic more quickly. It was never intended for the more complex roles we use computers in today. A lot of people don't count the Z3 as the first programmable digital computer because of this limitation. If you disqualify it for that reason, the title probably goes to the British Colossus the next year. Obviously Zuse did develop conditional branching (such as in his language Plankalkül), but that was years later and by then it had already been done by others. To Zuse's credit, he probably would have gotten to it much faster had he not had a real problem with allied bombing destroying his work. A major takeaway from this is that assigning titles like "first" and "inventor of computing" is quite silly. Computer science developed very, very quickly, with many of it key developments made by multiple people in parallel. We are largely familiar with what happened in the West for sociopolitical reasons, but similar work was done in Germany and the Soviet Union, often successfully. However, calling Zuse the inventor of computer science is as uncharitable to Turing as the reverse is to Zuse, both had their successes and failures. When I give talks on computer history, I often like to say things like "Steve Jobs, inventor of the Computer" to elicit a laugh. The unfortunate thing is that sometimes people don't realize that it's a joke.
genedickson 10y ago
There is a very important piece of history left out of this article and comments. The Nazis hired IBM to do the bulk of their computing. They may have used the Z3, but my uderstanding is that they didn't use it, though since it had such a narrowly specified field of use they could have used it and IBM wouldn't have known the difference. But the fact is that IBM supplied, at the very least, the vast majority of computer tech for the Nazis. I'd be very interested in a detailed comparison between whatever IBM was using at the time, the capabilities of the Z3, and whether it could have been modified to do the types of work IBM did. IBM's primary notoriety about all this is that they helped the Nazis to locate members of groups to be exterminated, but I expect that was a small part of what they did for the Nazis. But no IBM execs faced the Nuremburg Tribunals. Also, I think Zuse at least somewhat well known in the U.S. The most basic computer books I have seen all have something about him. The information is available and common in the U.S. in elementary computer books like they use to teach schoolkids what computers are. I've read a fair amount of stuff about him in elementary school computer texts that I got in thrift stores and like that. The basic information about who he was and what he did is commonly available. Details are less common, so when I saw the post I immediately checked it out, whereas I more commonly open up pages in new tabs and read them after I've done my shopping through the feed. But the reason I recognized the name of the man and the machine is because of elementary school books that I picked up in a thrift store in 99.
- mwfunk 10y ago
  I was under the impression that once the war broke out, IBM in Germany was cut off from the rest of the company, and the support provided to the German government that was so controversial was from the severed German appendage of IBM rather than something that IBM proper directed or profited from (sort of like how Coca-Cola's facilities in Germany turned into Fanta, which ironically made its way back to America after the war). Is this not true? That's not to say that non-German former IBM employees who offered assistance in Nazi Germany shouldn't be considered Nazi collaborators, but I never thought of their actions as reflecting on IBM as a whole or IBM's leadership at the time. Of course IBM made a decision to do business with the Nazi government prior to the war, but public perceptions of the Nazis in America were very different in the '30s, partially because the Nazis weren't nearly as well-understood then as now. Hitler was Life Magazine's Man of the Year in 1938, and prominent Americans like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford were known to be admirers. None of this is to excuse anyone's delusions about Hitler or the Nazis, or to excuse those who helped them. I just never thought it was 100% appropriate to tar IBM with that particular brush. Or am I missing vital information (very possible)?

151 points by mh-cx 10y ago

pieter1976 10y ago

Good to see Zuse on HN. It's possible to go and see his machines in Germany and I highly recommend it. This is a "forgotten" part of computing history because of WWII and deserves the light of day.

mh-cx 10y ago
Agree. The Z3 is exhibited at the Deutsches Museum in Munich: http://www.deutsches-museum.de/en/exhibitions/communication/computers/universal-computers/ http://www.deutsches-museum.de/en/exhibitions/communication/... Here's the Z3 in action (German only, try subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUXnhVrT4CI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUXnhVrT4CI
- c7h 10y ago
  I can highly recommend a visit there. Not only you can see an original Z4 and a replica of the Z3, but also lot's of more science and history related exhibitions. Don't miss the Enigma!
  - ptaipale 10y ago
    Among the more impressive specimens, you can also see an A4 rocket (better known as V2).
- jdietrich 10y ago
  The Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin has a reconstruction of the Z1. http://www.sdtb.de/Mathematics-and-Computer-Science.1256.0.html http://www.sdtb.de/Mathematics-and-Computer-Science.1256.0.h...
- lorenzhs 10y ago
  Z22 is at ZKM in Karlsruhe, but Deutsches Museum has a whole department on Z3 and related machines. I can highly recommend it to anyone interested in (very) early computers!
elcapitan 10y ago
One funny detail I read about those machines is that he had to steal (due to war shortages) copper cables from public telephone lines, which could have lead to death penalty (because of sabotage).
jgrahamc 10y ago
Also seems Turing and Zuse probably met in 1947: http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/Images/Turing_Zuse.pdf http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/Images/Turing_Zus...
- elcapitan 10y ago
  The article makes it sound like he waterboarded him, but that's probably just because the word 'interrogate' has become so unpredictably uncivilized in recent usage.
  - pbhjpbhj 10y ago
    It seems like there was probably a degree of duress and that this was a continuation of a series of "interrogations" where perhaps a greater deal of duress was necessary? Not that the German scientists were necessarily unwilling but that they were anyway required to attend: >"As the behaviour towards German scientists had already improved considerably in 1947,the interrogation had the more elegant form of a small colloquium. A handful of German specialists from Göttingen had been invited among them also myself. The significant German people who there gave talks were Professor Alwin Walther who had been thoroughly concerned with Hollerith machines and differential analyzers at the Darmstadt Institute of Technology, and Konrad Zuse with his relay calculators. If in addition Professor Friedrich Willers from Dresden had also participated, all leading German scientists who have been busy during the war in the development of sequence controlled calculating machines would have been there. Though Willers was in the Soviet occupation zone and therefore probably not available for the Britons." (http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/Images/Turing_Zuse.pdf http://www.mathcomp.leeds.ac.uk/turing2012/Images/Turing_Zus...) // Note that Porter from the NPL later mentions performing an "investigation" as part of a military operation, in his military uniform (despite there being no requirement to do so). Also: >"Undoubtedly, the participation at the colloquium of Göttingen was not optional. (ibid, p.5)" tl;dr - It sounds like there's evidence to suggest Turing had an unreported meeting with Zuse in 1948. There is also a suspicion that Turing could have met with Zuse in 1934 on a trip to Gottingen.
    - 10y ago

tiatia 10y ago

Konrad Who?

kuschku 10y ago
The person who invented the computer. Which somehow no US school teaches about. He also developed a very awesome high-level language very early on.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Charles Babbage is as far as I know the uncontested inventor of the computer, which somehow even German schools teach about.
  - mh-cx 10y ago
    Was it Turing complete? Because Zuse's Z3 was. I'm not saying though, that this is a criteria for calling any machine a computer. But it's probably what sets Zuse's achievement apart. UPDATE: I've just learned that Babbage's language was also Turing complete. So Zuse's achievement is solely having physically built the first working computer, while Babbage's machine was never realized.
    - elcapitan 10y ago
      Babbage invented the concept of the programmable computer, Zuse built a programmable electronic computer, which could later be shown to be turing-complete. Those things are pretty subtle, and the 'national' version is always the least subtle, I guess ;) Leonardo da Vinci also invented tanks and helicopters, and then it took a couple of hundred years to build some.
      - lugus35 10y ago
        And Pascal invented the calculator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_calculator https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_calculator

porsupah 10y ago

Minor trivia - one of the TRON: Legacy writers confirmed to me on Twitter that the character "Zuse" was indeed named in honor of the gentleman in question.

jdietrich 10y ago

Zuse is an interesting example of history being written by the victors. Ask any German who invented the computer and they'll tell you it was Konrad Zuse, but he is almost completely unknown elsewhere. Turing did brilliant work, but Zuse did the job of Turing and Tommy Flowers, working in isolation with very limited resources.

cmarschner 10y ago
As can be seen on Wikipedia: [1] vs. [2] - the English version of "computer science" does not mention Zuse. Time to change? Similarly, the German version of "Computer" mentions Zuse 20 times [3]; the English version starts describing the Z2 [4]. Quite fascinating how Wikipedia is written through the local lense. [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatik#Entwicklung_moderner_Rechenmaschinen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informatik#Entwicklung_moderne... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science [3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer#Electromechanical https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer#Electromechanical
- wslh 10y ago
  Excellent catch! I love Wikipedia with all their faults but probably we need not so difficult to build tools to recognize anomalies between Wikipedia cultures... sorry, languages.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- a3n 10y ago
  English and German sources are more likely to be accessible to people working in English and German, respectively, and less in the reverse. And Wikepedia is all about sources. So not surprising, but worth fixing.
schlowmo 10y ago
> "Zuse is an interesting example of history being written by the victors." This may hold true for the Zuse story, but he's also an example for german history about german scientists. While the Wikipedia article (both german and english) mentioning his ties to the NS and the german defence industry of that time, you probably find no hint about that at universities where lecture halls are named after him. For example in Hamburg, where the only "real" lecture hall at the CS department is named after him. In the small exhibition about his scientific life beneath this lecture hall you don't find a word about that (at least the last time I was there).

mafribe 10y ago

Also of interest are some of his other innovations: - Plankalkuel, by some criteria the first high-level programming language [1]. - Digital physics [2]. I have no idea if this is taken seriously by physicists. - First chess program, predating Wiener, Shannon and Turing [3]. - First implementation of floating point numbers [4]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalkül https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalkül [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_Space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculating_Space [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess#Chronology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_chess#Chronology [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#History

TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
Amazing work. >The original notation was two dimensional. (!)

marktangotango 10y ago

Throwing a mention of Atanosoff at Iowa State university in here, who's contributions were significant, but little known.

zer00eyz 10y ago

The history of computing is filled with so many names, and odd or tangled stories, this is one that I was un-aware of, and is super interesting. If you like these strange connections you should go and read about the Jacquard loom, that was using punch cards to control the patterns produced! It can be argued that "programmability" came before general purpose computing...

ericssmith 10y ago

"And, thanks to Konrad Zuse, computers and computer networks are what we have." Holy smokes, what an inaccurate statement. Arguably one of the obstacles to progress in technology is due the persistence of the fundamental computer design that has been employed since "Baby" ran its first program just before lunch on June 21, 1948, including an approach to fast random memory accesses. This approach was novel, based on CRTs used in radar. Most everything else -- design-wise -- was from the Moore School Lectures of 1946. And the really inspirational part of those was from the work on the ENIAC. The missing piece that needs to be more generally appreciated is how the early work on practical, general-purpose computers was quietly done in England while the Americans were squabbling over who was first.

eternalban 10y ago

Someone mentioned the V2 here. Interesting contrast between post-war careers of Von Brown and Zuse.

jcrawfordor 10y ago

So, Zuse's development were indeed important, but the Zuse Z3 had in important limitation that the article doesn't mention, which leads some people to not count it as "first": The Z3 was largely not Turing complete. This is because the Z3 had no conditional branching. In 1998 it was shown that the Z3 actually didn't need conditional branching, and it was Turing complete but only because it is possible to unroll conditional statements into a version where both branches are evaluated and then the result of one is cancelled. However, at the time of the Z3's development and use, this wasn't known. So while the Z3 is indeed an important early computer, it shares a significant discontinuity with modern computing that reflects the time. The Z3 was not intended as a "computer" in the modern sense, it was more of a calculating machine that could perform repeat arithmetic more quickly. It was never intended for the more complex roles we use computers in today. A lot of people don't count the Z3 as the first programmable digital computer because of this limitation. If you disqualify it for that reason, the title probably goes to the British Colossus the next year. Obviously Zuse did develop conditional branching (such as in his language Plankalkül), but that was years later and by then it had already been done by others. To Zuse's credit, he probably would have gotten to it much faster had he not had a real problem with allied bombing destroying his work. A major takeaway from this is that assigning titles like "first" and "inventor of computing" is quite silly. Computer science developed very, very quickly, with many of it key developments made by multiple people in parallel. We are largely familiar with what happened in the West for sociopolitical reasons, but similar work was done in Germany and the Soviet Union, often successfully. However, calling Zuse the inventor of computer science is as uncharitable to Turing as the reverse is to Zuse, both had their successes and failures. When I give talks on computer history, I often like to say things like "Steve Jobs, inventor of the Computer" to elicit a laugh. The unfortunate thing is that sometimes people don't realize that it's a joke.

genedickson 10y ago

There is a very important piece of history left out of this article and comments. The Nazis hired IBM to do the bulk of their computing. They may have used the Z3, but my uderstanding is that they didn't use it, though since it had such a narrowly specified field of use they could have used it and IBM wouldn't have known the difference. But the fact is that IBM supplied, at the very least, the vast majority of computer tech for the Nazis. I'd be very interested in a detailed comparison between whatever IBM was using at the time, the capabilities of the Z3, and whether it could have been modified to do the types of work IBM did. IBM's primary notoriety about all this is that they helped the Nazis to locate members of groups to be exterminated, but I expect that was a small part of what they did for the Nazis. But no IBM execs faced the Nuremburg Tribunals. Also, I think Zuse at least somewhat well known in the U.S. The most basic computer books I have seen all have something about him. The information is available and common in the U.S. in elementary computer books like they use to teach schoolkids what computers are. I've read a fair amount of stuff about him in elementary school computer texts that I got in thrift stores and like that. The basic information about who he was and what he did is commonly available. Details are less common, so when I saw the post I immediately checked it out, whereas I more commonly open up pages in new tabs and read them after I've done my shopping through the feed. But the reason I recognized the name of the man and the machine is because of elementary school books that I picked up in a thrift store in 99.

mwfunk 10y ago
I was under the impression that once the war broke out, IBM in Germany was cut off from the rest of the company, and the support provided to the German government that was so controversial was from the severed German appendage of IBM rather than something that IBM proper directed or profited from (sort of like how Coca-Cola's facilities in Germany turned into Fanta, which ironically made its way back to America after the war). Is this not true? That's not to say that non-German former IBM employees who offered assistance in Nazi Germany shouldn't be considered Nazi collaborators, but I never thought of their actions as reflecting on IBM as a whole or IBM's leadership at the time. Of course IBM made a decision to do business with the Nazi government prior to the war, but public perceptions of the Nazis in America were very different in the '30s, partially because the Nazis weren't nearly as well-understood then as now. Hitler was Life Magazine's Man of the Year in 1938, and prominent Americans like Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford were known to be admirers. None of this is to excuse anyone's delusions about Hitler or the Nazis, or to excuse those who helped them. I just never thought it was 100% appropriate to tar IBM with that particular brush. Or am I missing vital information (very possible)?