It happened in the living room of a cramped apartment in Berlin. The apartment belonged to the parents of Konrad Zuse, a young mechanical engineer. As a student, Zuse had detested the drudgery of the repetitious calculations, and during a class one day, while imagining what he might do with more free time, Zuse began to visualize a machine that would do the mind-numbing number crunching for him.
After graduating in 1935, Zuse worked days as a mechanical stress analyst for Henschel Aircraft Company and spent his evenings and weekends tinkering his dream machine. Quite independently, Zuse had rediscovered the basic computer architecture originated a century earlier by the English mathematician Charles Babbage. Babbage had also fantasized about having a machine that would relieve him of the tedium of lengthy calculations. But after many years and enormous expenditures, Babbage never managed to get his "Analytical Engine" working.
Completed in 1938, Zuse's first mechanical prototype -- the Z1 -- didn't work particularly well either, but the young engineer sensed he was on the right track. So he tried again and built a more sophisticated electromechanical version -- the Z2. This design also had serious drawbacks, forcing Zuse to take one more swing at the problem.
By now, Zuse needed financial backing, and he managed to talk Germany's Aerodynamics Research Institute into supporting the construction of the Z3. He argued that if the machine handled the complex calculations for airplane wing flutter, scarce personnel tied up a number crunchers could be freed up for other roles, accelerating aircraft production for Third Reich. Months of further refinement went by until -- just days after the Japanese blasted Pearl Harbor -- Zuse finally got the Z3 working. Singlehandedly, he had built the world's first general purpose program-controlled computer.
Of course, Zuse was far from alone in trying to build a computer. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, teams in the U.S. and Britain struggled with the technical problems of building a machine that could reliably perform complex calculations. The period is strewn with the conflicting claims of computer inventors.
Nearly all American-written histories regard the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Calculator), completed after the war's end in November 1945, as the first general purpose computer. In part, this is because the ENIAC was the first calculating device to use electronic tubes. Zuse's Z3 used slower electromechanical switches. But ENIAC's fame is more than a bit unfair, because in one crucial respect Konrad Zuse's Z machines have more in common with modern computers.
Like the ENIAC, Zuse's machines included the five essential computer components first set forth in Babbage's architecture: a central processor, a controller, a memory, a program input device, and an output display. But Zuse had a second insight that had escaped both Babbage and ENIAC's designers. Zuse recognized how difficult it would be to produce a machine that actually worked. With ten digits in the decimal number system, it was exceedingly tough to design a mechanism whose parts would mesh together flawlessly. If each rod, lever, and gear had to have ten different precise positions to represent symbols being manipulated, the contraption would have to be incredibly complicated. And, in fact, it was this problem which had doomed Babbage's Analytical Engine.
But Zuse was not a mathematician like Babbage, and, naturally enough, he saw the problem from a mechanical engineer's perspective. Instead of designing a machine elaborate enough to handle a complex problem, he redesigned the problem, reducing it to its barest essence so that a simple mechanism could do the job.
Instead of using the decimal numbers, all of Zuse's machines were binary computers. Zuse was the first to realize that just because it's convenient for ten-fingered humans to use base 10 numbers doesn't mean it's the easiest system for machines. As Zuse saw it, the simpler the notation, the simpler the contraption, and the more likely it would work. With just 1s and 0s to manipulated by on/off switches, there is no simpler way to handle information.
The Z3 was the world's first working digital computer, because it was the first machine to integrate Babbage's architecture with binary digits. One without the other simply would not do. By realizing this, Konrad Zuse brought digital computing into being.
Today's, fifty years after the catastrophe at Pearl Harbor, America seems to have learned well the lessons that Yamamoto taught. Never let down your guard. Stay armed to the teeth. And, given the unceasing threat of nuclear oblivion during four decades of Cold War, these were indeed valuable lessons.
Now, however, with the shattered remains of the Soviet Empire being shovelled into history's dustbin, Americans can begin thinking about the implications of that other bit of history made in December 1941. The digital computer has profoundly altered the course of history. Its enormous information processing power has launched humanity into a new epoch of scientific discovery, economic evolution, and political interdependence. We have not experienced such a sea change in human affairs for 500 years, since Gutenberg's printing press set off an information explosion that led to the Scientific Revolution and, later, the Industrial Revolution.
To prosper in this new era, Americans must absorb the new rules of the game -- brainpower instead of firepower; investment instead of armament. Several decades ago, the Japanese learned these Information Age lessons. And now, with half the population, Japan's economy is on track to surpass America's by 2001, the 60th anniversary of Pearl Harbor. Perhaps before then, the American people will rethink the history made in December 1941 and redecide which "damn things" matter most.