The Computer - My Life

Konrad Zuse is one of the great pioneers of the computer age. He created the first fully automated, program controlled, freely programmable computer using binary floating-point calculation. It was operational in 1941. He built his first machines in Berlin during the Second World War, with bombs falling all around, and after the war he built up a company that was taken over by Siemens in 1967. Zuse was an inventor in the traditional style, full of phantastic ideas, but also gifted with a powerful analytical mind. Single-handedly, he developed one of the first programming languages, the Plan Calculus, including features copied only decades later in other languages. He wrote numerous books and articles and won many honors and awards. This is his autobiography, written in an engagingly lively and pleasant style, full of anecdotes, reminiscences, and philosophical asides.

It traces his life from his childhood in East Prussia, through tense wartime experiences and hard times building up his business after the war, to a ripe old age and well-earned celebrity.

Konrad Zuse is one of the great pioneers of the computer age. He created the first stored-program computer in 1941 and continued to build machines for a quarter-century, as well as writing books and articles. This is his autobiography - lively, witty, full of fascinating asides.

1 Ancestors and parents - Early childhood memories - School days - Metropolis - Abitur.- 2 Studies (not without detours and by-ways) and general studies - First inventions - The Akademischer Verein Motiv - Student life between science and politics.- 3 The early years of the computer (and a digression on its prehistory) - Colleagues remember - From mechanics to electromechanics - Schreyer's electronic computing machine - First outside contacts - Thoughts on the future.- 4 Outbreak of the war and (first) call-up - Structural engineer in aircraft construction - The Z2 and Z3 - Second call-up - Zuse Ingenieurbüro und Apparatebau, Berlin - The first process computer.- 5 Origins of the Z4 - News from the United States - Attempt at a Ph.D. dissertation - Computing machine for logic operations - Final months of the war in Berlin - The evacuation - Z4 completed in Göttingen - Final war days in the Allgäu.- 6 End of the war - Refugees in Hinterstein - The Plankalkül - The computing universe - Automation and self-reproducing systems - A logarithmic computing machine - Computer development in Germany and the United States - Move to Hopferau near Füssen - The mill of the Patent Office.- 7 The Zuse-Ingenieurbüro, Hopferau bei Füssen - First business partners: IBM and Remington Rand - The first pipelining design - Founding of ZUSE KG in Neukirchen - The Z4 in the ETH in Zurich - The computer in Europe: taking stock - Lost opportunities - The first German contract: the Z5.- 8 The partners leave - Computing machine for land use zoning - Electronics gains acceptance - First funds from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft - Losing one's way (and possibly a lost opportunity) - The arrayprocessor - Custom work for geodesists - The Graphomat Z64 - Growth and crisis of ZUSE KG - The end.- 9 Free for science (again) - Honors - A look to the future.- Appendices.- 1. From Forms to Program Control.- 2. Construction of Devices.- 3. On Computer Architecture.- 4. On the Plan Calculus.- 5. Lecture on the Occasion of the Award of the Honorary Doctorate by the Technical University of Berlin (Extract).- 6. The Computer Did Not Fall from Heaven.- Notes.- References.- Name Index.- Computer Index.