3 ms·

Relative to the 0 times I have ever heard his name mentioned vs. the countless times I have read about him on manic midnight wikipedia binges, I think Zuse seem

by mhh__ 5y ago

Relative to the 0 times I have ever heard his name mentioned vs. the countless times I have read about him on manic midnight wikipedia binges, I think Zuse seems very unsung.

jgrahamc 5y ago
Agreed. Zuse did a lot of cool stuff.
hutzlibu 5y ago
"I think Zuse seems very unsung" Of what I know, this might be, because he worked for the Nazis and his prototypes were mostly destroyed in the war and somewhat forgotten and seemed to have not been influential to the general branch of computing.
- mhh__ 5y ago
  Oh sure. I know why, but I find computer engineering a bit more interesting than theory so I'd rather read about him than quite a few others.
- TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
  Von Braun also worked for the Nazis. Interesting to speculate what would have happened if Zuse had been paper-clipped to the US and given a huge budget.
  - schlupa 5y ago
    One funny anecdote about Zuse during the war was that he managed to save his Z4 because it was named as V4 in the paperwork. The wehrmacht officers thought it was one of these retaliation weapon V1, V2, V3 so V4 was very important and got high priority to be hidden away somewhere.
- adrian_b 5y ago
  There is an indirect influence of Zuse in the daily life of most programmers. The "for" keyword used in the "for" loops comes from Algol 60, which inherited it from its predecessor from 1958, IAL. The "for" loops were introduced in IAL by Heinz Rutishauser, who had used "fuer" loops (i.e. "for" in German) for the first time in 1951, when he had published a paper describing a computer programming language, 3 years before Fortran introduced the "do" loops in 1954. In the Rutishauser paper from 1951, he quotes Zuse with his paper about a programming language (published in 1948) as the inspiration for his own improved programming language, which included the "for" loops.
amacbride 5y ago
Not completely surprising (from Wikipedia): “While Zuse never became a member of the Nazi Party, he is not known to have expressed any doubts or qualms about working for the Nazi war effort.”

by mhh__ 5y ago

Relative to the 0 times I have ever heard his name mentioned vs. the countless times I have read about him on manic midnight wikipedia binges, I think Zuse seems very unsung.

jgrahamc 5y ago

Agreed. Zuse did a lot of cool stuff.

hutzlibu 5y ago

"I think Zuse seems very unsung" Of what I know, this might be, because he worked for the Nazis and his prototypes were mostly destroyed in the war and somewhat forgotten and seemed to have not been influential to the general branch of computing.

mhh__ 5y ago
Oh sure. I know why, but I find computer engineering a bit more interesting than theory so I'd rather read about him than quite a few others.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Von Braun also worked for the Nazis. Interesting to speculate what would have happened if Zuse had been paper-clipped to the US and given a huge budget.
- schlupa 5y ago
  One funny anecdote about Zuse during the war was that he managed to save his Z4 because it was named as V4 in the paperwork. The wehrmacht officers thought it was one of these retaliation weapon V1, V2, V3 so V4 was very important and got high priority to be hidden away somewhere.
adrian_b 5y ago
There is an indirect influence of Zuse in the daily life of most programmers. The "for" keyword used in the "for" loops comes from Algol 60, which inherited it from its predecessor from 1958, IAL. The "for" loops were introduced in IAL by Heinz Rutishauser, who had used "fuer" loops (i.e. "for" in German) for the first time in 1951, when he had published a paper describing a computer programming language, 3 years before Fortran introduced the "do" loops in 1954. In the Rutishauser paper from 1951, he quotes Zuse with his paper about a programming language (published in 1948) as the inspiration for his own improved programming language, which included the "for" loops.

amacbride 5y ago

Not completely surprising (from Wikipedia): “While Zuse never became a member of the Nazi Party, he is not known to have expressed any doubts or qualms about working for the Nazi war effort.”