[TUHS] The birth of the Z3

[grog@lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey)]

On Saturday, 12 May 2018 at 11:04:26 -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 6:21 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>
>> Way back on this day in 1941, Conrad Zuse unveiled the Z3; it was the
>> first programmable automatic computer as we know it (Colossus 1 was not
>> general-purpose).  The last news I heard about the Z3 was that she was
>> destroyed in an air-raid...
>>
>> This pretty much started computing, as we know it.
>
> But .. until we also include a conditional branch the ability to do
> self modify code we don't really have the machine with think of as
> the automatic programmable computer.
>
> Check out:
> http://page.mi.fu-berlin.de/rojas/1993/Who_invented_the_computer.pdf its a
> fun read.

That's an interesting document, but it refers to the Z1, not the Z3.
But Wikipedia confirms that the Z3 also didn't have conditional
instructions.

Conditional branch is only one way to do that, of course.  The PDP-8,
for example, didn't have one, just (like many machines of the day)
conditional skip instructions.

Greg
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