The Z3 was an
electromechanical computer designed by
Konrad Zuse. It was one of the world's first working programmable, fully automatic computing machines. It was Turing-complete, at least in theory, 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 completed in 1941 in Berlin and was faster and far more reliable than the
Z1 and
Z2. The Z3 stored its program on an
external tape, thus no rewiring was necessary to change programs.
Improving on the basic
Z2 machine, he built the Z3 in 1941, which was a highly secret project of the German government. Dr. Jenissen, member of the Reich Air Ministry acted as a government supervisor for orders of the ministry to Zuse's company ZUSE Apparatebau. The German Aircraft Research Institute used it to perform statistical analyses of wing flutter. On 12 May 1941 the Z3 was presented to an audience of scientists including the professors Alfred Teichmann and Curt Schmieden of the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt ("German Laboratory for Aviation"), in Berlin. Zuse then moved onto the
Z4 design which was completed days before the war ended. The original Z3 was destroyed in 1943 during an Allied bombardment of Berlin. A fully functioning replica was built in the 1960s by Zuse's company, Zuse KG, and is on permanent display in the Deutsches Museum.
Supplement: 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. The Z3
floating point was improved over that of the
Z1 in that it implemented exception handling. The exceptional values plus infinity, minus infinity and undefined could be generated and passed through operations.
View the
technical drawings of the Z3.
View a
simulation of the entire Z3 (with descriptions in German).
View a
3D simulation of the Z3 (with descriptions in German, requires a VRML browser).
View a
simulation of the adder circuit (with descriptions in German).
View a
simulation of the shifter circuit.
View a
simulation of the normalizer circuit.
View a
simulation of the decimal to binary converter.
View a
simulation of the decimal place adjuster.
cf.
Wikipedia