One still can see an operational original Z22 in my home town [0] . Quite impressive (would be Z7 by normal counting, Zuse also invented creative versioning of CPUs I guess)
It's also fun to imagine this happening in e.g. the 1860s instead of the 1930s/1940s. I believe the tech was there (because of telegraphs), the production of relays just wasn't industrialized yet, so everything would be larger, handmade and more expensive.
He was the first hacker as far as I know. He was constantly making jokes, laughing at formal things. I was in the Zuze Museum (his house), and I remember I think in his master Thesis he made some jokes (I think wrote some numbers in binary, which were easy to mix, like 2 as 10) which for the time, I think were relatively bold. He had a very "hacker" sense of humor. He was called out a couple of times, but had no real respect for imposed authority.
The ideas were sort of there, but the hardware... Hollerith's original census machine in 1888 [1] got data processing going, but it wasn't a volume product. Bear in mind that neither low-cost steel or milling machines existed at the time. Making things with large numbers of precision parts was not yet commercially feasible. The clock industry eventually cracked that, but metal clocks and watches at low cost in high volume took until the 1890s.
Making insulated wire was really hard. Before plastics, wire insulation was varnish or fabric.
I restore old Teletypes as a hobby. The oldest one I have working is from about 1926. All the wiring insulation had decayed and had to be replaced. Reliable wire is surprisingly modern.
Reliable rubber (neoprene) is only from WWII. Plastics are even later.
> In 1837, American scientist and teacher Joseph Henry took his first tour of Europe. During his visit to London, he made a point of visiting a man he greatly admired, the mathematician Charles Babbage. Accompanying Henry were his friend Alexander Bache, and his new acquaintance and fellow experimenter in telegraphy, Charles Wheatstone. Babbage told his visitors of his upcoming appointment to demonstrate a calculating machine to a member of Parliament, but was even more excited to show them his plans for another machine, “which will far transcend the powers of the first…” Henry recorded the outlines of Babbage’s plan in his diary.
So close! Henry made the electromagnet practical. Babbage "originated the concept of a digital programmable computer" as per Wikipedia.
There's no debate Babbage was behind the Difference Engine.
However, Lovelace's article on the Analytical Engine did not just expand it by demonstrating a programming language. It included physical differences to Babbage's - and this is because she didn't just sit and watch, she assisted on the design of the machine itself.
> Again, it might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine. Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.
the batteries alone would've taken up a building, I reckon. They didn't have dynamos or anything like that at industrial scale until the end of the century
Advent of computing podcast did a series on his computers, of which this is a link to one of the episodes: https://adventofcomputing.com/?guid=170d60ae-c534-46f6-968b-...
great podcast, highly recommend if you have any interest in the history of computing
One still can see an operational original Z22 in my home town [0] . Quite impressive (would be Z7 by normal counting, Zuse also invented creative versioning of CPUs I guess)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z22_(computer)
Konrad Zuse performed an amazing feat.
It's also fun to imagine this happening in e.g. the 1860s instead of the 1930s/1940s. I believe the tech was there (because of telegraphs), the production of relays just wasn't industrialized yet, so everything would be larger, handmade and more expensive.
He was the first hacker as far as I know. He was constantly making jokes, laughing at formal things. I was in the Zuze Museum (his house), and I remember I think in his master Thesis he made some jokes (I think wrote some numbers in binary, which were easy to mix, like 2 as 10) which for the time, I think were relatively bold. He had a very "hacker" sense of humor. He was called out a couple of times, but had no real respect for imposed authority.
The ideas were sort of there, but the hardware... Hollerith's original census machine in 1888 [1] got data processing going, but it wasn't a volume product. Bear in mind that neither low-cost steel or milling machines existed at the time. Making things with large numbers of precision parts was not yet commercially feasible. The clock industry eventually cracked that, but metal clocks and watches at low cost in high volume took until the 1890s.
Making insulated wire was really hard. Before plastics, wire insulation was varnish or fabric. I restore old Teletypes as a hobby. The oldest one I have working is from about 1926. All the wiring insulation had decayed and had to be replaced. Reliable wire is surprisingly modern. Reliable rubber (neoprene) is only from WWII. Plastics are even later.
[1] https://www.census.gov/about/history/bureau-history/census-i...
> Making insulated wire was really hard.
Fair point. This would probably have made the 1860 relay computer another 2x more expensive.
Agreed. Though I bet the performance of such a computer would barely crack kHz territory.
kilo-Hertz was sound-barrier territory even in the in the 1930s ;)
E.g. Z1 was running at 1Hz, Z2 at 5Hz and Z3 at 5..10Hz.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z2_(computer)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)
Then I was an order of magnitude off!
https://technicshistory.com/2017/01/29/the-relay/
> In 1837, American scientist and teacher Joseph Henry took his first tour of Europe. During his visit to London, he made a point of visiting a man he greatly admired, the mathematician Charles Babbage. Accompanying Henry were his friend Alexander Bache, and his new acquaintance and fellow experimenter in telegraphy, Charles Wheatstone. Babbage told his visitors of his upcoming appointment to demonstrate a calculating machine to a member of Parliament, but was even more excited to show them his plans for another machine, “which will far transcend the powers of the first…” Henry recorded the outlines of Babbage’s plan in his diary.
So close! Henry made the electromagnet practical. Babbage "originated the concept of a digital programmable computer" as per Wikipedia.
Just a note on no man being an island - there's a bit of debate on how much of the Analytical Engine was Babbage, and how much of it was Lovelace.
> there's a bit of debate on how much of the Analytical Engine was Babbage, and how much of it was Lovelace.
No there isn't. That "debate" is about who wrote the first program for the Analytical Engine (which I didn't mention).
There's no debate Babbage was behind the Difference Engine.
However, Lovelace's article on the Analytical Engine did not just expand it by demonstrating a programming language. It included physical differences to Babbage's - and this is because she didn't just sit and watch, she assisted on the design of the machine itself.
> Again, it might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine. Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.
the batteries alone would've taken up a building, I reckon. They didn't have dynamos or anything like that at industrial scale until the end of the century
Klemens Krause has been documenting his restoration of the mechanical Z1 replica: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtpOUadaBh31n6Pdscwhwopmh...
Konrad had the ideas; others received the glory. History has been unfair to him—he was simply on the wrong side of it.
Great project.