I'm not sure I'd call him "unheralded". When I saw that description, I thought, "huh, there's someone other than Zuse I should know about?", but then the article was about Zuse.
I mean sure, he's not Turing- or Von-Neumann-level famous, but in both those cases their fame largely stems from their involvement in a number of other things as well (Turing's early AI writing and theoretical models of computing, and Von Neumann's role in the Manhattan Project and game theory). Zuse is pretty famous in comparison to the other computer-builders of the era, e.g. John Mauchly or John Vincent Atanasoff.
He is also pretty well known in Germany. That (I guess you could call it local fame) seems about appropriate for what he did. He is no Turing, after all.
The new computer science and automation building of my university in Germany (now the second largest building on the campus) was named after Zuse. I would say that’s quite the honor and recognition, especially considering the other buildings are named after Humboldt, Newton (mechanical engineering), Kirchhoff (electrical engineering), Helmholtz, Leibniz (library), Röntgen, Curie and Faraday.
He acted a bit later, but the same pattern: making his first computer in an estate using commodity hardware, then producing a quite few interesting machines some of which were the best in continental Europe at the time.
Sadly, it seems that all european computers are essentially evolutionary dead ends - so nobody remembers them and their creators.
The article is kind of incomplete and concentrating more on the circumstances (nazis, war, ..) then his actual inventions.
- He invented the first turing complete computer the Z3 which was finished in 1941, the Z4 (which was based on the Z3 was the first commercial computer)
- He is also responsible for the first high level computing language - Planalkül
One of the more fascinating things about the history of computing is vacuum tubes where first commercially available in 1920 and several computing devices where so quickly built from them. When you look at how unstable early vacuum tubes actually where the gap where a computer was possible and when the first one was built was fairly small.
thanks so much for linking this. I have always been a fan of the history of computing (e.g., Moshe Vardi mentioned Charles Peirce in a talk once http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce, and I have seen a reconstruction of one of Leibniz' calculators [http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Datei:Leibnitzrech...), but I did not know that Konrad Zuse got a patent on the concept of pipelining in 1949. (AFAIR Hennesy and Pattern's "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach" cites Tomasulo's algorithm from 1967)
When I was in undergrad my university offered an unusual course: "The History of Computing". The prof wrote the text for the course, but it was actually a pretty good book, unlike many prof written texts.
Zuse was given his due in this book (and the course).
A recommended read if you're interested in the foundations of computing. It's oriented much more towards early computation devices than the PC era. If you want the story of Jobs, look elsewhere.
It was a mechanical, binary computer. It ran at 1 Hz, had 1400 bits of memory, and it could add, subtract, multiply and divide. It even had a control unit which means it could run real computer programs. A 22 bit floating point multiply took 10 clock cycles.
And all of that in a completely mechanical system!
I mean sure, he's not Turing- or Von-Neumann-level famous, but in both those cases their fame largely stems from their involvement in a number of other things as well (Turing's early AI writing and theoretical models of computing, and Von Neumann's role in the Manhattan Project and game theory). Zuse is pretty famous in comparison to the other computer-builders of the era, e.g. John Mauchly or John Vincent Atanasoff.