The Dead Media Notebook by Bruce Sterling, Richard Kadrey, Tom Jennings, Tom Whitwell

Only one of Zuse’s computers survived the war: the Z4. This was started in 1942, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to find parts, and in 1943, the Berlin blitz began. The machine was moved around the city to avoid air raids, and then moved to Gottingen, before finally being shifted to Hinterstein, a small village in. Bavaria.
    After the end of the war, the Z4 was moved to Zurich in Switzerland, and in 1950, this Ziffernrechner, or number calculator, was installed at the Federal Polytechnical Institute. Zuse’s developments attracted the attention of IBM which seemed mainly interested in his patents - and Remington Rand, amongst others, but discussions came to nothing. In 1949, he founded his own computer company, Zuse KG, which developed a line of Z computers, and eventually employed about 1,000 people.
    However, short of capital, he gradually sold out to Siemens, the giant industrial conglomerate.and devoted himself to research. In later life, Zuse received many honours, and in 1984 a research institute, the Konrad Zuse Centre for Information Technology (ZIB) was named after him. A copy of his first programme-controlled electro-mechanical digital computer, the Z3, was made in 1960 and put on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. A copy of the Z1 was constructed in 1989, and can be found in the Museum for Transport and Technology in Berlin. Konrad Zuse, scientist and inventor, born June 2, 1910 died December 18, 1995.
    [J. A. N. Lee offers a second Zuse obituary.] The last of our great pioneers of the 1930’s died Monday, December 18. Konrad Zuse, developer of the Z-1 through Z-4 machines was clearly one of those who foresaw the development of the computer and did something about it well before those whom we will acknowledge next year in Philadelphia.
    Zuse’s image suffered from his location both in geography and time, since we now know that his work included in an elementary way many of the features of modern machines. I had the pleasure of meeting with Dr. Zuse on several occasions, the last at the IFIP World Computer Congress in Hamburg in August 1994 where he drew standing room only audiences in a conference that was not that well attended elsewhere.
    I have only seen one obituary so far, and I am disappointed that it did not also mention his artistic capabilities also. His paintings were magnificent, and his recent portraits of German computer pioneers (prepared for the IFIP Congress) showed yet another side of this multi-talented pioneer. I was hoping that we could attract him to attend the ENIAC celebrations in February next, but sadly that opportunity is gone.
    I for one will miss him. He was always the one with the joke and for greeting one with humor. I was in a meeting with him the day the Berlin Wall came down. I asked him what he felt about this, to which he replied “Now we can get on with our work!”
    [And a third]
    Konrad Zuse I learned this morning of the death of Konrad Zuse, at age 85. As many of you know, Zuse conceived of the notion of a general purpose digital computer, using binary arithmetic, while a student in Berlin in the 1930s. With the help of his parents and a few friends he set out to build one in his parents’ apartment.
    At the outbreak of the Second World War he was released from service in the German army to work at the Henschel Aircraft Company, where he was a stress analyst. He continued working on his computing ideas, and in December 1941 he completed a machine that computed in binary, using floating point, with a 64-word memory, and which was programmed by paper tape.
    This machine is regarded as the first general purpose, functional digital computer in the world. It was destroyed during the war. Later on Zuse gave it the name “Z3,” by which it is now known. In 1962 Zuse, now the head of a commercial computer company, built a reconstruction based on drawings that did survive.
    This computer, which I saw in operation at the Deutsches Museum a few years ago, is