Konrad Zuse

What Zuse contributed

Machines such as Konrad Zuse's Z3 used binary floating-point representation in electromechanical hardware, while later electronic computers adopted binary or other discrete representations according to architecture. Binary was influential, but early electronic computing was not uniformly binary. Konrad Zuse's Z3, completed in 1941, was a program-controlled electromechanical binary machine rather than an electronic computer. Colossus, operational during the Second World War, used electronic valves and was programmable for specialised cryptanalytic processing, but it was not a general-purpose stored-program computer. ENIAC, completed in 1945 and publicly unveiled in 1946, was a large-scale general-purpose electronic digital computer, initially programmed through switches, cables and function tables rather. Konrad Zuse designed Plankalkül in the 1940s, but it was not implemented as an operational language at the time. Grace Hopper's A-0 system around 1951-1952 is often described as an early compiler or automatic programming system. Other systems, including the Laning-Zierler compiler, contributed to algebraic translation.

Why it mattered

Provides a robust common discrete representation for machine storage, processing and transmission. Executes long, changeable sequences of information transformations at electronic speed.