Digital computers
Electromechanical
Claude Shannon's 1937 master's thesis laid the foundations of digital computing, with his insight
of applying Boolean algebra to the analysis and synthesis of switching circuits being the basic
concept which underlies all electronic digital computers.[36][37]
By 1938, the United States Navy had developed the Torpedo Data Computer, an
electromechanical analog computer for submarines that used trigonometry to solve the
problem of firing a torpedo at a moving target. During World War II, similar devices were
developed in other countries.[38]
Replica of Konrad Zuse's Z3, the first fully automatic, digital
(electromechanical) computer
Early digital computers were electromechanical; electric switches drove mechanical relays to
perform the calculation. These devices had a low operating speed and were eventually
superseded by much faster all-electric computers, originally using vacuum tubes. The Z2,
created by German engineer Konrad Zuse in 1939 in Berlin, was one of the earliest examples of
an electromechanical relay computer.[39]
Konrad Zuse, inventor of the modern computer[40][41]
In 1941, Zuse followed his earlier machine up with the Z3, the world's first working
electromechanical programmable, fully automatic digital computer.[42][43] The Z3 was built with
2000 relays, implementing a 22 bit word length that operated at a clock frequency of about 5–
10 Hz.[44] Program code was supplied on punched film while data could be stored in 64 words of
memory or supplied from the keyboard. It was quite similar to modern machines in some
respects, pioneering numerous advances such as floating-point numbers. Rather than the
harder-to-implement decimal system (used in Charles Babbage's earlier design), using
a binary system meant that Zuse's machines were easier to build and potentially more reliable,
given the technologies available at that time.[45] The Z3 was not itself a universal computer but
could be extended to be Turing complete.[46][47]
