From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: grog@lemis.com (Greg 'groggy' Lehey) Date: Sun, 13 May 2018 16:52:04 +1000 Subject: [TUHS] The birth of the Z3 In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <20180513065204.GD7079@eureka.lemis.com> On Saturday, 12 May 2018 at 11:04:26 -0400, Clem Cole wrote: > On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 6:21 PM, Dave Horsfall 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 -- Sent from my desktop computer. Finger grog at lemis.com for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft mail program reports problems, please read http://lemis.com/broken-MUA -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 163 bytes Desc: not available URL: