The invention of the computer

There is not just one inventor of the computer, as the ideas of many scientists and engineers led to its invention. These ideas were developed in the 1930s and 1940s, mostly independently of each other, in Germany, Great Britain and the USA, and were turned into working machines.

In Germany, Konrad Zuse hit upon the idea of building a program-controlled calculating machine when he had to deal with extensive calculations in statics. In 1935, he began to design a program-controlled calculating machine in his parents' home in Berlin. It was based on the binary system and used punched tape for the program input. The Z1, which was built between 1936 and 1938, was a purely mechanical machine which was not fully operational. In 1940, Zuse began to build a successor to the Z1 based on relay technology. In May 1941, he finished the Z3 - worldwide the first freely programmable program-controlled automatic calculator that was operational.