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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
        • dTal 10y ago
          Slight difference - da Vinci's tanks and helicopters wouldn't actually have worked, whereas the Analytical Engine absolutely would have.
          • elcapitan 10y ago
            "Absolutely would have worked" is probably the closest you can get to modern software development ;) Or more seriously put: It's a concept for a machine with 55k moving parts and powered by a steam engine. "Would work" is probably a bold statement considering how far off theoretical designs always are from the engineering reality, by all experience.
            • jacquesm 10y ago
              http://plan28.org/ http://plan28.org/
              • elcapitan 10y ago
                "We have been pecking away at Babbage’s original design drawings for some while now and have found with regret that we are unable to reverse engineer a coherent and consistent understanding of the Analytical Engine from the mechanical drawings alone. " http://blog.plan28.org/2016/05/spring-2016-report-to-computer.html http://blog.plan28.org/2016/05/spring-2016-report-to-compute... If you read further, it becomes pretty clear that it's more or less a theoretical idea. A great one though, granted.
      • the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
        > Because Zuse's Z3 was. That's debatable. Maybe it was turing complete on the paper but it was never designed to be and it was not used as a turing complete machine.
      • Sandman 10y ago
        > So Zuse's achievement is solely having physically built the first working computer, while Babbage's machine was never realized. And the fact that Z3 was based on binary, while the analytical engine wasn't.
    • _Codemonkeyism 10y ago
      Which creates the interesting questions of: 1. Is da Vinci (or someone earlier) the inventor of the helicopter? Does invention include something working? 2. What is a computer? A calculator? Is the Antikythera a computer? Does it need to be Turing complete? 3. Didn't hear about Babbage in 13y of German schools ;-) But then what are schools? Is university included in "school"?
      • alblue 10y ago
        Technically the first computers were (mainly) females who were good at maths and were put forward to compute maths tables for the navy. In fact the reason that we call (modern) computers by that name is because they are named after the original humans who did the job. In fact Babbage worked on the calculation engine(s) precisely to aid in the automated calculations that they would be providing, including identifying several corrections in log tables that were printed around that time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_computer The first electromechanical computers were arguably the Lorenz machine (reconstruction at TNMOC next to Bletchley Park) and the Bombe (a reconstruction of which is available at Bletchley park). The first electrical only computer was ENIAC, though you tend not to hear about these from American historians as some of these facts were classified until (relatively) recently.
    • tormeh 10y ago
      If all we're going for is "first $something computer" then Leibniz probably wins.
  • whatever_dude 10y ago
    "Invented the computer" is a strong assertion. I rather like Walter Isaacson's history on "The Innovators", where he talks about the parallel creations of Zuse and other inventors, to show that things are not as black-and-white; that the "inventor of the computer" depends on a murky definition of what a "computer" is, and what the final act of creating it is. It's more likely that we should attribute the invention of the computer to a collective group of individuals; some that advanced the notion of what a computer should work a little bit, some that advanced a lot, and some that had good ideas that didn't go anywhere at the time.
    • kuschku 10y ago
      Going from "some mechanical devices" to "a fully electric computer with a higher level programming language and full turing capabilities" is quite a leap. That’s the pretty much what "inventing" something means.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• mh-cx 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse Most remarkable: > Zuse completed his work entirely independently of other leading computer scientists and mathematicians of his day. Between 1936 and 1945, he was in near-total intellectual isolation.
• jsnider3 10y ago
  The person described in the article that you didn't read.