Zuse, Konrad

Konrad Zuse (b.1910 in Berlin, d. 1995 in Bonn) (Fig. 1) studied construction engineering at the Technische Hochschule Berlin-Charlottenburg and received the degree Dipl. Ing. in 1935. In 1934, he had already started development work on program-controlled computing machines with electromechanical and mechanical elements. He felt that the tiresome calculations required in this field should be done by a machine. In 1938, he had completed his first model (Z1). In 1941, his first fully working machine (Z3) was operational; it used the binary number system with floating-point arithmetic. Zuse invented a relay adder in which four relays produced the sum of two binary places and that, in an n-place binary adder, yields the n-place sum in one switching step.