It's interesting that the Z3 was denied funding from the German gov't for not being war-important. It turns out they were ahead of the computing game and squandered it, as US and GB relied on computers for code breaking and performing calculations for developing the atom bomb.
It's not a blunder to the tune of invading Russia, but it's still interesting.
Yeah I disagree here. The general public's knowledge on WW2 and their perception of that war usually has been very disproportionately influenced and shaped directly by the post wars memoirs of german generals & other important figures of the 3rd Reich. Which is why there are so many myths and outright falsehoods on the war (pushed by those authors to rehabilitate/distance themselves from their own actions) that are still very very widely believed to be true. It's pretty fitting that "history is written by the victors" is one of those narratives.
Plus it makes even less sense when ww2 Germany is almost always believed to have been way ahead of the allies technologically. Way more than they actually were, so unless the allies were veryyy bad at rewriting history to erase Germany's contributions... I'd probably guess It's more due to it being a very obscure technology and had almost no "cool" factor, and v. little influence on the overall technology compared to the V-2 or jet fighters
It’s rather like the development of the automobile. The first computers—EDVAC, ENIAC, Z3, ABC—all had idiosyncrasies that reflect on them being transitional technologies.
Interestingly, “computer” was the term applied to office workers whose responsibility was doing calculations. Which is why the first machines were called “automatic computers”. (Fast forward to today, “computing” is perceived now mostly as “using a computer”, such as web browsing or reading email.)
It can be argued that Z3 was not as general purpose (Turing complete) as ENIAC.
"The Z3 was demonstrated in 1998 to be, in principle, Turing-complete. However, because it lacked conditional branching, the Z3 only meets this definition by speculatively computing all possible outcomes of a calculation."
The claim was the first programmable, general-purpose "electronic computer". Zuse's machine was "electro mechanic" (i.e. based on relays instead of tubes).
That seems a little unclear.
In the title it says "Eniac: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer"
In the outline: "Presents a history of the world's first programmable computer, ENIAC"
In the reviews once "Nobody doubts the pair designed and built ENIAC, the world's first fully electronic computer" and another time "This account of how an engineer barely out of college and a physicist with dreams of predicting the weather, conceived and built the world's first computer."
On page 3 of the book: "They built ENIAC, the first digital, general-purpose, electronic computer". It all depends on how you define the term "computer". Not to forget that "computers" at that time were the women who did the calculations; see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer#Etymology. Nearly all computers today are electronic and digital; so ENIAC was one of the pioneers of this development (the Colossus was another one).
