Konrad Zuse
(1910-1995)

Died aged c. 85

Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse (German: [ˈkɔnʁaːt ˈtsuːzə]; 22 June 1910 – 18 December 1995) was a German civil engineer, pioneering computer scientist, inventor and businessman. His greatest achievement was the world's first programmable computer; the functional program-controlled Turing-complete Z3 became operational in May 1941. Thanks to this machine and its predecessors, Zuse has often been regarded as the inventor of the modern computer. Zuse was noted for the S2 computing machine, considered the first process control computer. In 1941, he founded one of the earliest computer businesses, producing the Z4, which became the world's first commercial computer. From 1943 to 1945 he designed Plankalkül, the first high-level programming language. In 1969, Zuse suggested the concept of a computation-based universe in his book Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space). Much of his early work was financed by his family and commerce, but after 1939 he was given resources by the government of Nazi Germany. Due to World War II, Zuse's work went largely unnoticed in the United Kingdom and the United States. Possibly his first documented influence on a US company was IBM's option on his patents in 1946.

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Commemorated on 1 plaque

In den kriegszerstörten Häusern Methfesselstraße 10 und 7 entwickelte und baute Konrad Zuse von 1936 bis 1944 die programm-gesteuerten Rechenanlagen Z1 bis Z4 1941 ging der Rechner ZUSE Z3 als erster funktionsfähiger Computer der Welt in Betrieb

Methfesselstraße, Kreuzberg, Berlin, Germany where they developed and built program-controlled computers