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Z4 (computer)

Computer

The Z4 was arguably the world's first commercial digital computer, and is the oldest surviving programmable computer. It was designed, and manufactured by early computer scientist Konrad Zuse's company Zuse Apparatebau, for an order placed by Henschel & Son, in 1942; though only partially assembled in Berlin, then completed in Göttingen in the Third Reich in April 1945, but not delivered before the collapse of Nazi Germany, in 1945.

The Z4 was Zuse's final target for the Z3 design. Like the earlier Z2, it comprised a combination of mechanical memory and electromechanical logic. The Z4 was used at the ETH Zurich from 1950 to 1955, also serving as the inspiration for the construction of the ERMETH, the first Swiss computer, created under the direction of ETH engineer Ambros Speiser. The Z4 was very similar to the Z3 in its design but was significantly enhanced in a number of respects. The memory consisted of 32-bit rather than 22-bit floating point words. The Program Construction Unit (Planfertigungsteil) punched the program tapes, making programming and correcting programs for the machine much easier by the use of symbolic operations and memory cells. Numbers were entered and output as decimal floating-point even though the internal working was in binary. The machine had a large repertoire of instructions including square root, MAX, MIN and sine.

Text: Wikipédia, CC BY-SA 4.0. · Image: Clemens PFEIFFER (CC BY 2.5) ·