Today in 1936, German civil engineer and early computer pioneer Konrad Zuse filed for a patent on the automatic execution of calculations, a process that will become central to the Z-1, Germany’s first computer.
B. Jack Copeland & Giovanni Sommaruga in “The Stored-Program Universal Computer: Did Zuse Anticipate Turing and von Neumann?”:
As a student, Zuse had become painfully aware that engineers must perform what he called ‘big and awful calculations’. ‘That is really not right for a man’, he said. ‘It’s beneath a man. That should be accomplished with machines.’ He started to rough out designs for a calculating machine in 1934, while still a student, and with his departure from Henschel set up a workshop in the living room of his parents’ Berlin apartment. There Zuse began constructing his first calculator, in 1936…
Zuse’s 1936 and 1941 patent applications described an automatic numerical calculator—a very advanced form of relay-based desk calculator, programmable and capable of floating-point calculations, and yet compact enough and cheap enough to be stationed permanently beside the user, probably an engineer. Zuse’s machine was, in a sense, a personal computer. [Raúl] Rojas said: ‘As early as 1935 or so, Zuse started thinking about programmable mechanical calculators specially designed for engineers. His vision at the time, and in the ensuing years, was not of a large and bulky supercomputer but of a desktop calculating machine.’ Zuse’s desktop calculator added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided.