The series on setting the record straight about computer history continues. While I was at LinuxTag in Karlsruhe last weekend, I took the opportunity to visit the ZKM, a museum for new media that had been warmly recommended to me on various mailing lists before I set off.
Alongside plenty of exhibits that make an information-age heart beat faster, the ZKM also has a working Z22.
It stands on the first floor at the edge of the exhibition, humming away to itself. Massive, imposing, huge – loud.
One cabinet just for the water-cooled 3500-watt power supply. Two more cabinets for the tube memory. Input and output go through a Bundeswehr teleprinter. On top of that, programs can show their results on a row of diodes. During my visit a program was running that played a Wagner symphony in an endless loop.
The Z22 with serial number 13 was built in 1957 by Zuse AG. The world’s first computer company (a limited partnership back then) was founded in Neukirchen in 1949 by Konrad Zuse, Harry Stucken and Frank Eckhard. A total of 55 Z22s were built. Five of them were exported abroad. They ran a special programming language developed by Zuse AG and later, after a few necessary modifications, mastered the newly developed ALGOL60 programming language. With their 140 KHz the machines mainly lent a hand in business administration, but also in ballistics, aerodynamics, optics, surveying, and mechanical and nuclear reactor engineering, among other things.
Given its comparatively feeble 140 KHz clock rate and its paper-tape mass storage, the conditions programmers enjoyed in the eighties, which I describe in my article “Wasted Space”, were positively paradisiacal.
More information about number 13 can be found on the website of the Karlsruhe University of Applied Sciences and its two caretakers, Mr Baumann and Mr Kammerer, and of course on Wikipedia.
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