Today in Entrepreneurial History: May 12

On this day in 1941 Konrad Zuse revealed the Z3, the world’s first working programmable, fully automatic computer, in Berlin.

Unfortunately (but fortunately for the Allied war effort) the computer was destroyed in 1943 by an Allied bombardment of Berlin.

More on the computer:

The Z3 was an electromechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse. It was the world’s first working programmable, fully automatic computing machine. It was Turing-complete, and by modern standards the Z3 was one of the first machines that could be considered a complete computing machine, although it lacked the conditional branch operation. The Z3 was built with 2,000 relays, implementing a 22 bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5–10 Hz. Program code and data were stored on punched film.

The Z3 was completed in Berlin in 1941. The German Aircraft Research Institute used it to perform statistical analyses of wing flutter.

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