Even for the skeptics among us, it’s hard to overstate the importance of this anniversary: 75 years ago – at the height of the Second World War – a 31-year-old German civil engineer called Konrad Zuse presented the Z3. It was the first programmable, automatic digital computer – and was widely viewed as the child of a family of machines we take for granted today, from desktop computers and mobile devices to the massive data centers controlling the world.
Compared to the phones and pads we carry in our pockets, however, the Z3 was huge. It was a cluster of glass-fronted wooden cabinets and wiring looms.
And its use was not intended for gaming or social networking on trams and in school yards, but for the German Aircraft Research Institute to perform statistical analyses of wing-flutter.