ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Wednesday, December 20, 1995 TAG: 9512200056
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-5 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BERLIN
TYPE: NEWS OBIT
SOURCE: Associated Press
Konrad Zuse, whose Nazi-era constructions of second-hand sheet metal, glass plates, cranks and punch cards helped pioneer the modern digital computer, has died at age 85.
Zuse (pronounced ZSOO-zah) died Monday of heart failure.
A Berlin-born engineer and lifelong tinkerer, he created a series of machines in the 1930s and early 1940s that were among the world's first calculators and computers.
Though crude, they embraced the binary digital concept that is the basis for today's computers. Zuse said he built the machines to relieve the tedium of mathematical calculations in his job as a structural engineer at an aircraft manufacturer.
His first fully automated, program-controlled computer, the Z3, was finished in 1941 with funding from the Third Reich's Aviation Research Institute. It was destroyed by Allied bombing.
``It was my fate to continue my work,'' he said in a profile published in Information Week last year. ``But I wasn't certain if my work would survive the fighting.''
His more powerful Z4 computer barely did. The Nazis ordered the one-ton machine out of Berlin and to the underground Harz mountain chambers, where scientists were building V1 and V2 buzz bombs. It was later hidden in a small village in Bavaria.
At the end of the war, computing devices created in the United States, particularly the ENIAC machine at the University of Pennsylvania, received a great deal of attention.
``After the war, news of American devices caused quite a stir,'' Zuse told Information Week. ``The world knew nothing of my work nor of the work of others here, and so the impression grew that the computer was an American invention.''
Zuse eventually formed his own company, Zuse KG, to build and market his designs. He registered some 50 patents and counted Zeiss Optics and Remington Rand as customers.
LENGTH: Short : 49 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Konrad Zuse said that after World War II, ``The worldby CNBknew nothing of my work ... so the impression grew that the computer
was an American invention.''