Born in Germany in 1910, Konrad Zuse had little access to the speed and general reliability of modern calculators. One of his earliest jobs as a design engineer had him doing many pen-and-paper calculations every day, which bored him out of his mind. Properly motivated, he experimented with the construction of computers throughout his early life.
In 1936, Zuse created the world’s first binary digital computer, the Z1. It was revolutionary, but it was also massive, clumsy, limited, and ludicrously expensive. Zuse began improving upon his design, creating the Z2 with military funding and starting a company to build and present the Z3, the world’s first fully operational electromechanical computer. He also created the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül (Plan Calculus), and designed a modular tower automaton called the Helix Tower. He died of heart failure on December 18, 1995, at the age of 85.
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