Konrad Zuse (1910-1995) was a construction engineer for the Henschel Aircraft Company in Berlin at the beginning of World War II. He had the title of “inventor of the modern computer” because he invented automatic calculators to help him with his calculations. There were some difficulties with doing large calculations which is keeping track of results to use it in the later steps of the calculation, so Zuse wanted to make something that would help him overcome the difficulty. He thought of an automatic calculator device that has a control, a memory and a calculator for the arithmetic would solve his problem.
In 1936, Zuse invented Z1, the first binary computer. It was like a testing to see how well this thing works. This was based on the yes/no principal. However, in 1939, Zuse made the Z2, the first fully functioning computer. Then in 1941, he completed Z3 which is made by recycled materials donated by his university staff and students. Z3 is the world’s first electronic, digital computer. To store his programs and data for Z3, he had to use old movie films instead of paper or punched cards because paper was hard to find in Germany during the war.
Even though Zuse made the first world’s computer, he was unable to convince the Nazi government to support his computer work because the Germans thought they were winning the war already and they needed no further research anymore.
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