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Comment by bachback | Hacker News Reader

Time to correct the record: the World's first electronic, programmable computer was build by a German by the name of Konrad Zuse in May 1941 [1] called Z3 [2]. He designed a language for it called Plankalkül [3].

Eniac was announced in 1946. Incidentally Turing wanted to be build one in 1945, called Electronic Brain. His paper "on computable numbers" was published in 1936.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_%28computer%29 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plankalk%C3%BCl

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The German wikipedia has a nice overview over early compuers. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC#Vergleich_mit_anderen_fr...

        Name        operating since     Floating Point   Binary     Eletric       Programmable       Turingcomplete
     Zuse Z3         May 1941                 yes         yes         no             yes                 yes
     Atanasoff-Berry Summer 1941              no          yes         yes            no                  no
     Colossus        1943                     no          yes         yes          with rewiring         no
     Mark I          1944                     no          no          no           punch cards           yes
     Zuse Z4         March 1944              yes          yes         no           punch cards           yes
     ENIAC           1946                     no          no          yes          with rewiring         yes
     ENIAC           1948                     no          no          yes     with a resistor matrix     yes

In college, I had a very old professor from... I think it was Romania, or possibly Bulgaria. Anyway, one day he was saying he had worked for Konrad Zuse, and I blurted out "Wait, you worked for the N..." and stopped there, thinking better of it. He laughed and claimed it had been after the war. I did later learn not to spit out every thought that entered my head.

The Germans also came up with the mouse around the same time as Doug Engelbart's team did, technically beating him to the punch:

http://www.oldmouse.com/mouse/misc/telefunken.shtml

I'm kind of curious what other parts of computer history are overlooked because they happened outside of the anglosphere.

Not even close. That same site says that Englebart first constructed a mouse in 1963, 5 years earlier than that demo.

http://www.oldmouse.com/mouse/firstmouse.shtml

Englebart's work wasn't secret; various other people may have constructed their own mice after 1963, and yes, that sort of thing is interesting.

Ah, good catch. I didn't click beyond the site I linked - bit misleading in its wording then.

Interestingly, the Z3 was not meant to be Turing complete (by Zuse) (that is, he did not intend the functionality that Turing completeness describes. Living in Germany back then he did not know about Turing nor about the "on computable numbers" paper).

Only in 1998 did people find out that the Z3 was indeed Turing complete.

What's also impressive is that Zuse didn't know about Charles Babbage either.

The Z3 was electromechanical (it used relays) not electronic.