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- Hacker News
- That's a real shame.
I first heard of Zuse when I spent a week in class in the Zuse conference room at DEC Spit Brook Road, Nashua aka ZKO1. (there were many rooms in that facility named after computing pioneers...)
There were pictures of Zuse and the Z3 in that room, but also an original Konrad Zuse oil painting. I wonder what happened to that painting...
by loph - I wonder why they post such an article after you already can not go. If they did it earlier, they would have provided the museum with some more final visitors.by 1718627440
- There were a few articles before that too. E.g. the currently linked heise article is from June.by karussell
- Hopefully can be consolidated into an existing museum. Very specific museums are just hard to run in general worldwide unless they are uber famous and often that fades in a generation or two.by bhouston
- Interesting that this pops up on HN. It was a real nice spot and I'm sad that it goes away. They had really nice holiday activities for kids, but also for adults and elderly. E.g. I myself tried VR the second time in one of the rooms from ZCOM.
I especially enjoyed ZCOM when at one point the Fabmobil visited them and I learned a couple of nice people. Not only computer hacking people but also craftsmans etc too.
Also a couple of times the ZCOM gave us space for our computer club (PPP, rip) in the hope we can benefit from each other. But unfortunately the interests stick to a few great "hardcore" people only, although we offered great and free pizza ;)
Fun times. Not even too long ago...
by karussell - Although Zuse definitely received too little credit in the West (for somewhat understandable political reasons), there's another Zuse museum in Hünfeld, along with exhibitions at the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin. So this is not as profound as it might seem. I suspect the main problem with this museum was just that it's off the beaten path.by matherial
- Yes the Berlin exhibit is really well done with some beautiful artifacts well displayed and explained. The Z1 replica is a marvel: Zuse himself built in 1989.
IIRC they also have sensible documentatioin about his Nazi connections that puts this work into appropriate context.
by NelsonMinar - That's exactly what I was going to say. I saw that pretty nice exhibit on Zuse in the Deutsches Technikmuseum. Perhaps it could be merged in? (Although I doubt it's that simple)
- I've seen some of his machines in Technology Museum in Berlin. The first iteration was mechanical done with cleverly cut out metal plates.by scotty79
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)
Playlist showcasing the current restoration work: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtpOUadaBh31n6Pdscwhwopmh...
by 7373737373 - The problem was probably in the location. Hoyerswerda is a place which does not attract visitors, even the locals left in droves (isn't it the German record holder when it comes to cities losing population?)
In Dresden, Leipzig or Berlin, 30.000 visitors a year could have been reached.
by inglor_cz - I think Hoyerswerda was chosen for a reason: funding money should not always go to the big city and so they thought why not built it where Konrad Zuse went to school? It kind of makes sense...by karussell
- It’s sad to see how the American propaganda destroyed the true genius of computation, to a point that there is not even a museum for his work. Imagine doing the work of many, and many years before them, and then getting here.by pmkary
- What's the American propaganda piece of it?by xyzelement
- https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad-Zuse-Museum_H%C3%BCnfel...
Apart from a quite a few museums having his machines (or replicas).
by Tomte - On behalf of all Americans, I would like to apologize that our propaganda prevented you from reading the article and understanding that the Museum has existed for his work for some time. Furthermore, I apologize that our propaganda is so strong that not even the Deutsche themselves could overcome it to learn about one of their own scientists, visit and financially support the museum of one of their countrymen.
I guess its only a matter of time until we put the final nail in Röntgen's coffin and the Deutsche finally start using the proper term: X-rays.
by dessimus - Location, location, location. It's just in the middle of absolutely nothing. The surrounding has a bit of nature as appeal but it's depression county in regards of everything else.by trentor
- I think Hoyerswerda is to this day best known for something that happened in the early 90s: Local neo-nazis rioted against and physically attacked some foreign contract workers and asylum seekers while the local police watched and did nothing.by ahartmetz
- For every bit of history there is 'the danger period', when it is still recent enough that most people don't consider it special but old enough that special effort needs to be made to preserve it. Random chance as much as anything else determines what eventually makes it to the status of 'precious antique'. I hope they find a way to mothball it until society is more appreciative, I think it is a unique collection and worth preserving.by jacquesm
- The work of Zuse is way out of the danger zone, isn't it? Mobile phones with LCDs are in the danger zone, or the phone booth, but not the first working computers ever build.by ahofmann
- Sad, but the reality is, Hoyerswerda is a small town in east east Germany and computer museums are already super niche in general. How many tourists could they possibly get? Maybe the Nixdorf museum in Paderborn can snatch it up. Paderborn is no metropolis either, but at least it’s relatively central and the museum gets 13 times as many yearly visitors.by wvbdmp
- Funny you should mention it, I was aware of the Zuse museum and figured I'd jump on a train next time I was in Berlin to go check it out. (In fairness, I've been thinking this the past four or five times I've gone to Berlin, on the assumption the museum would only get better while I procrastinated...)
Anyway, three minutes ago, after reading about the museum's likely fate (sigh!) on HN, I've booked tickets to Berlin in October.
Hoyerswerda or bust!
by lb1lf - Indeed. I've lived in Germany for 25 years, and I had to Google where it is. If 10% of the local town came to visit every year, that'd still only produce 8 visitors per day. The numbers just don't make sense.by wheels
- Zuse is probably the most under-appreciated thinker of the 20th century. Everybody's heard of Claude Shannon, von Neumann, Feynman, and all the rest of 'em, but Zuse's enormous contributions have received rather little attention.
To summarize a couple of the highlights:
In 1936 Germany, Konrad Zuse began developing the Z1, a mechanical calculating machine programmed via perforated 35mm film. By 1937, he had broadened its architecture toward universal digital computation in the vein of Alan Turing. Although completed in 1938, the machine struggled with mechanical inaccuracies -- the same challenge which plagued Charles Babbage's much earlier work on the Difference Engine. Zuse overcame these mechanical hurdles in 1941 with the Z3, an operational digital computer capable of universal computation.
In fact, the Z3 was the world's first working machine physically capable of universal computation. The first real computer.
Zuse was also one of the great philosophers of the 20th century. In a book he published titled "Calculating Space," He was the first to surmise that our universe is computable by a deterministic computer program. Every "simulation hypothesis" and "mathematical universe" theory is downstream of Zuse. (One could argue that the Pythagoreans and neo-Pythagoreans, who held that the world was at root mathematical, were truly first, but Zuse made important and original contributions nevertheless.) It's important to note that, to this day, there are no physical observations which contradict Zuse's notion, as he wrote it, of a computable universe.
I would think that the German state or EU should provide funding for his museum. If that's not the case, it's a shame.
by A_D_E_P_T - You missed some important points that explain why he's not celebrated.
His efforts received enormous amounts of funding from the Nazis.
Much of his specialized 'computers' were explicitly for the war effort, including planes.
He was a big fan of utilizing computing for racial and genealogy research. The Nazis had plans drawn out to murder orders of magnitude more people based on this sort of research had they won (Generalplan Ost).
It was not like he was forced at gunpoint to participate, he was all in for the funding. Much like Von Braun, but did not have the luck to be paperclipped.
by fooker - > there are no physical observations which contradict Zuse's notion, as he wrote it, of a computable universe.
There is no model capable of simulating the universe either.
I also wonder what such an observation would have to look like. Observations per se are unique and recorded and therefore can be reconstructed via trivial computation. Which brings us to the laws of physics. You may believe that they are utterly wrong and the universe is deterministic after all, but then the burden of proof is upon you.
by tgv - There are also no physical observations that contradict the notion of God. The problem is that no such observations are even possible, or at least no test they could be put to that could disprove the theory.by chuckadams
- >I would think that the German state or EU should provide funding for his museum. If that's not the case, it's a shame.
There is another Museum of his, which is still funded.
by Asmod4n - I think Zuse is underrated because he worked pretty much alone. The other names and particularly Von Nuemann were prolific collaborators apart from being very good at what they do. There’s probably a takeaway from how this turned out.by tchalla
- The argument that the Z3 is universal "was an impressive party trick, but diverged entirely from the way the machine was designed, how it was actually used, or indeed from anything that would have made sense in the 1940s."
Source: ENIAC in Action p255.
by kens