Konrad Zuse

German engineer who, completely independently of British and American computing efforts, built the Z3 (1941), the first working program-controlled general-purpose digital computer. The Z3, destroyed in the bombing of Berlin, never got beyond the stage of running test programs. Zuse's subsequent Z4 was the first large-scale computer to go into regular operation in Continental Europe. It was rented by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) for five years, where it provided the first scientific computing service in mainland Europe. The Z3 and Z4 were both relay-based machines. During the postwar years, Zuse's company supplied Europe with large numbers of small, relatively cheap relay-based computers, then an excellent alternative to costly electronic machines.