5 ms·

Konrad Zuse's Homepage

78 points by nanna 2y ago

nanna 2y ago
Site built by Konrad Zuse's son Horst Zuse, a computer scientist.
- SuperHeavy256 2y ago
  seems a bit biased.
  - progre 2y ago
    I think there is no expectation of objectivity on a personal homepage
  - larodi 2y ago
    What bias precisely do you imply?
  - sho_hn 2y ago
    So this strikes to the heart of a frustration I have. When I was younger, I took debates over "who invented X" at face value, based on how engaged and serious others were about them: That person alone had the idea first, all by themselves, and realized it. As an adult of course I realize the world is much more complicated. By and large, inventions don't happen in a vacuum, they occur when their time has come. Knowledge/ideas/theory/precursors are floating about, often there is a community of people already engaged in the area, and then at best someone makes a notable contribution or excels at integration, often boosted by fortuitous circumstances. Yet these topics are rarely if ever reported on that way. At most you get a "someone else had written about it already in a paper" + debate about the chances the inventor had known and read about the paper (I think for Zuse this is the debate about whether he had read Turing or not). For examples like this I'd love to read a more nuanced piece that takes me into the inventor's world first: What were the hot topics of their day? What devices were known to them already? Who were they in contact with? What inspired them? What allowed them to get organized and pursue a particular path? etc. More often than not invention is a long process that involves multiple heads and years to decades. I think I want a book like "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes, which really excels at sketching the milieu of first-half 20th century physics, but with Turing, von Neumann, Zuse, etc. instead ...
    - ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
      > I think for Zuse this is the debate about whether he had read Turing or not In his own words: I started in 1934, working independently and without knowledge of other developments going on around me. In fact, I hadn't even heard of Charles Babbage when I embarked on my work. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Zuse/ https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Zuse/
      - sho_hn 2y ago
        Yep, I know. There's another interesting tidbit: John von Neumann lived in Berlin 1926-1929 and was a lecturer at Zuse's university. Contact has not been reported, and Zuse was at highschool for most of that time, but they may have crossed paths, or at least there may have been indirect intellectual influence via the surroundings Zuse studied in subsequently. It's stunning (and sad) sometimes just how much of the modern world was about to reveal itself in the academic communities of Berlin of the 20s and 30s before facism tore it asunder.
  - fefe23 2y ago
    I never understood this culture of envy in tech. Can't you just marvel at the achievement without worrying whether celebrating this could be seen as taking something away from somebody else? Personally I don't care much who was first. There were others roughly around the same time trying similar things. It's the same with "who invented the airplane" and "who invented radio". Many countries lay claim to having been the first to do X or Y. I don't care much and I don't think anybody else should. Zuse built an amazing machine. Does that not warrant a bit of respect? Add that he had no help from the government or any big company. Does that still not warrant a bit of respect? In my life I have "invented" quite a few algorithms that later turned out to be an old hat because smarter people had already invented them years or even decades earlier. To me that does not take away from my achievement :-) It's not important whether you are the first one to achieve something. It is important that you achieved it.
    - jcynix 2y ago
      > I never understood this culture of envy in tech. Eny seems to be one of humanities driving forces. If it was in tech only. I once passed through Gilroy in California which claims to be "Garlic Capital of the World" … and I visited Lautrec, where they already grew their (delicious) pink garlic since the middle ages. All I care for is taste, not quantity of production. And let's not start to think about the various books of records, sigh. Or 100 places or things to do or visit before one dies?
    - oytis 2y ago
      The linked website literally has a link to a page called "Zuse vs von Neumann" (not available any more) on the front page.
      - sgift 2y ago
        Without knowing what's behind the link that says nothing. It could be comparing their achievements, the architectures or many things. You just (seem to?) interpret it in a certain way.
    - hulitu 2y ago
      > I never understood this culture of envy in tech. It is the CADT culture. Those people cannot concentrate on something. If an UI is not changed every 2 Months then it is not worth using it.
- sgt 2y ago
  Here's his son's webpage: https://web.archive.org/web/20061211025253/http://irb.cs.tu-berlin.de/~zuse/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20061211025253/http://irb.cs.tu-...
fefe23 2y ago
For what it's worth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer) The claims made on that web page are true. There have been several attempts to rebuild one of his machines. One of them used to be shown in the Technikmuseum in Berlin, but apparently it has been moved to the Konrad Zuse Museum in Hünich. The machine used binary arithmetic and could do floating point addition (0.8 seconds) and multiplication (3 seconds) and had 64 22-bit words of memory. It's actually quite a technological marvel considering it was built in the war and he had trouble getting the materials to build it as military projects were prioritized and the Nazis didn't consider his machine important for the war effort.
- sho_hn 2y ago
  If you ever visit Berlin, especially with kids, the city has a lovely Technology Museum with an computer section that also features Zuse replicas and gear, including a replica of the still-mechanical Z1. I think Zuse himself made and donated it to the museum. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)#/media/File%3AGerman_Museum_of_Technology%2C_Berlin_2017_024.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)#/media/File%3A... I absolutely love the giant honking hand-crank you can manually turn to make it go. As a child seeing the mechanical Z1 really drove home for me that computers are understandable and not magic, literally breaking what they do down into little managable parts and steps and the art of making a computer is in sizing (how many adders do you need?) and arrangement (how can you make it produce results faster?). With some erudite commentary and informed pointing-at-things I think you have a good chance to recreate that revelation for your kids too. More info on the Z1: https://www.mi.fu-berlin.de/inf/groups/ag-ki/publications/Z1-Architecture/Z1-Architecture.pdf https://www.mi.fu-berlin.de/inf/groups/ag-ki/publications/Z1... It's quite magnificent how close this still is to modern CPU architectures, the major innovation of branch prediction aside.
  - mark_undoio 2y ago
    One thing that struck me about the Z1 was how closely it paralleled things I'd expect to see in a silicon implementation of a CPU: I recall seeing: different physical blocks for different logic, a big regular blog for the memory and other blocks for ALU, etc, addressing handled by column and row selection lines, evaluating bit values by putting a signal onto the data line and seeing whether the value changes... But all implemented with mechanical linkages (so a signal is a pull of a rod, a connection is a hooking of a rod onto some other linkage, etc.
rsynnott 2y ago
I'm disappointed that this is not his _actual_ website (since he only died in 1995, this is borderline possible).
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

78 points by nanna 2y ago

nanna 2y ago

Site built by Konrad Zuse's son Horst Zuse, a computer scientist.

SuperHeavy256 2y ago
seems a bit biased.
- progre 2y ago
  I think there is no expectation of objectivity on a personal homepage
- larodi 2y ago
  What bias precisely do you imply?
- sho_hn 2y ago
  So this strikes to the heart of a frustration I have. When I was younger, I took debates over "who invented X" at face value, based on how engaged and serious others were about them: That person alone had the idea first, all by themselves, and realized it. As an adult of course I realize the world is much more complicated. By and large, inventions don't happen in a vacuum, they occur when their time has come. Knowledge/ideas/theory/precursors are floating about, often there is a community of people already engaged in the area, and then at best someone makes a notable contribution or excels at integration, often boosted by fortuitous circumstances. Yet these topics are rarely if ever reported on that way. At most you get a "someone else had written about it already in a paper" + debate about the chances the inventor had known and read about the paper (I think for Zuse this is the debate about whether he had read Turing or not). For examples like this I'd love to read a more nuanced piece that takes me into the inventor's world first: What were the hot topics of their day? What devices were known to them already? Who were they in contact with? What inspired them? What allowed them to get organized and pursue a particular path? etc. More often than not invention is a long process that involves multiple heads and years to decades. I think I want a book like "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Rhodes, which really excels at sketching the milieu of first-half 20th century physics, but with Turing, von Neumann, Zuse, etc. instead ...
  - ReleaseCandidat 2y ago
    > I think for Zuse this is the debate about whether he had read Turing or not In his own words: I started in 1934, working independently and without knowledge of other developments going on around me. In fact, I hadn't even heard of Charles Babbage when I embarked on my work. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Zuse/ https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Zuse/
    - sho_hn 2y ago
      Yep, I know. There's another interesting tidbit: John von Neumann lived in Berlin 1926-1929 and was a lecturer at Zuse's university. Contact has not been reported, and Zuse was at highschool for most of that time, but they may have crossed paths, or at least there may have been indirect intellectual influence via the surroundings Zuse studied in subsequently. It's stunning (and sad) sometimes just how much of the modern world was about to reveal itself in the academic communities of Berlin of the 20s and 30s before facism tore it asunder.
- fefe23 2y ago
  I never understood this culture of envy in tech. Can't you just marvel at the achievement without worrying whether celebrating this could be seen as taking something away from somebody else? Personally I don't care much who was first. There were others roughly around the same time trying similar things. It's the same with "who invented the airplane" and "who invented radio". Many countries lay claim to having been the first to do X or Y. I don't care much and I don't think anybody else should. Zuse built an amazing machine. Does that not warrant a bit of respect? Add that he had no help from the government or any big company. Does that still not warrant a bit of respect? In my life I have "invented" quite a few algorithms that later turned out to be an old hat because smarter people had already invented them years or even decades earlier. To me that does not take away from my achievement :-) It's not important whether you are the first one to achieve something. It is important that you achieved it.
  - jcynix 2y ago
    > I never understood this culture of envy in tech. Eny seems to be one of humanities driving forces. If it was in tech only. I once passed through Gilroy in California which claims to be "Garlic Capital of the World" … and I visited Lautrec, where they already grew their (delicious) pink garlic since the middle ages. All I care for is taste, not quantity of production. And let's not start to think about the various books of records, sigh. Or 100 places or things to do or visit before one dies?
  - oytis 2y ago
    The linked website literally has a link to a page called "Zuse vs von Neumann" (not available any more) on the front page.
    - sgift 2y ago
      Without knowing what's behind the link that says nothing. It could be comparing their achievements, the architectures or many things. You just (seem to?) interpret it in a certain way.
  - hulitu 2y ago
    > I never understood this culture of envy in tech. It is the CADT culture. Those people cannot concentrate on something. If an UI is not changed every 2 Months then it is not worth using it.
sgt 2y ago
Here's his son's webpage: https://web.archive.org/web/20061211025253/http://irb.cs.tu-berlin.de/~zuse/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20061211025253/http://irb.cs.tu-...

fefe23 2y ago

For what it's worth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer) The claims made on that web page are true. There have been several attempts to rebuild one of his machines. One of them used to be shown in the Technikmuseum in Berlin, but apparently it has been moved to the Konrad Zuse Museum in Hünich. The machine used binary arithmetic and could do floating point addition (0.8 seconds) and multiplication (3 seconds) and had 64 22-bit words of memory. It's actually quite a technological marvel considering it was built in the war and he had trouble getting the materials to build it as military projects were prioritized and the Nazis didn't consider his machine important for the war effort.

sho_hn 2y ago
If you ever visit Berlin, especially with kids, the city has a lovely Technology Museum with an computer section that also features Zuse replicas and gear, including a replica of the still-mechanical Z1. I think Zuse himself made and donated it to the museum. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)#/media/File%3AGerman_Museum_of_Technology%2C_Berlin_2017_024.jpg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)#/media/File%3A... I absolutely love the giant honking hand-crank you can manually turn to make it go. As a child seeing the mechanical Z1 really drove home for me that computers are understandable and not magic, literally breaking what they do down into little managable parts and steps and the art of making a computer is in sizing (how many adders do you need?) and arrangement (how can you make it produce results faster?). With some erudite commentary and informed pointing-at-things I think you have a good chance to recreate that revelation for your kids too. More info on the Z1: https://www.mi.fu-berlin.de/inf/groups/ag-ki/publications/Z1-Architecture/Z1-Architecture.pdf https://www.mi.fu-berlin.de/inf/groups/ag-ki/publications/Z1... It's quite magnificent how close this still is to modern CPU architectures, the major innovation of branch prediction aside.
- mark_undoio 2y ago
  One thing that struck me about the Z1 was how closely it paralleled things I'd expect to see in a silicon implementation of a CPU: I recall seeing: different physical blocks for different logic, a big regular blog for the memory and other blocks for ALU, etc, addressing handled by column and row selection lines, evaluating bit values by putting a signal onto the data line and seeing whether the value changes... But all implemented with mechanical linkages (so a signal is a pull of a rod, a connection is a hooking of a rod onto some other linkage, etc.

rsynnott 2y ago

I'm disappointed that this is not his _actual_ website (since he only died in 1995, this is borderline possible).

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]