Information / Electronics & Computing

Programmable Computer

Konrad Zuse’s Z3 (1941) is the first working, freely programmable digital computer; tube machines like ENIAC follow.

Zuse built the Z3 in Berlin from about 2,600 telephone relays; it computed in binary with floating point. In Britain the tube machine Colossus (1943/44) broke German radio ciphers, and in 1945/46 ENIAC went into service in the US (around 5,000 additions per second). In 1945 John von Neumann described the stored-program architecture still used today; the first such program ran in Manchester in 1948.