Comment on The German government is working on an OSS "Sovereign Workplace"

• rockSlayer@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Turing and Church did a lot of the heavy lifting for the theoretical side and contributed heavily to automating the decoding of the enigma encryption, but the most common modern computer architecture was decided in a conference in New York. The person that is credited with designing the architecture is named John Von Neumann.

  Before them, it was Babbage, an Englishman. How did Germany contribute to computers? That’s not to say that I don’t think Germany can’t handle designing this software, they definitely can. But they didn’t have a very big hand in the history of computers

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  • jadero@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’m not sure, but I think they were making a joke. Germany created the Enigma machine. Turing et al did some seminal work as a result of the need to quickly decrypt Enigma messages. Ergo, we wouldn’t have computers without the Germans.

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  • lol3droflxp@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Zuse built the arguably first digitally programmable computer or something like that.

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    • fluke@snake.substantialplumbing.repair ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’ve three bridges to sell to you

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      • abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        It depends on your definition of “computer”.

        There was a period of very rapid development, largely government funded efforts as both sides of the war saw computers as critical strategically, and a bunch projects went from “hey do you think this might work?” to “here’s an unlimited budget, go make it work.”

        They were all heavily influenced by each other (and spying on each other, and lying about the extent of their intelligence gathering capabilities) and computers were progressively developed in paralel.

        Who did it “first” depends on where you draw the line in the sand and say “yes, this is a computer”. Even the “turing” test doesn’t work as a clear definition, because the first computers that could pass the that test were barely able to pass in practice.

        Also, I think you could make a compelling argument that none of those projects would’ve received all that funding (and there definitely would’ve been less espionage) unless a war was going on. If the war hadn’t happened, computers would’ve taken much longer to be invented.

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  • Scrath@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I wouldn’t go as far as to say that without germans we wouldn’t have computers today. What he is probably referencing is the Zuse Z3, which can be considered one of the first computers.

    The main argument against it being the first is that it’s a mechanical design rather than electronic and that turing completeness was only achieved on it much later using a trick which the designer had not intended. Interestingly, ENIAC, which is considered the first computer by many, uses a decimal design. The Z3 on the other hand was already using binary.

    I took this info from the german wikipedia article on the Z3. I’m not sure if the english article goes into similar detail on those points.

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  • nikscha@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Konrad Zuse actually invented the computer at the same time as Turing, and in complete intellectual isolation from Turing.

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    • Agent641@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Was it in base-10 rather than binary?

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      • nikscha@feddit.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        It actually was in base-1.5 (secret nazi tech made this possible)

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  • lemmyvore@feddit.nl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The person that is credited with designing the architecture is named John Von Neumann.

    If you’re thinking of the stores program concept it wasn’t Newmann, but it’s a common misconception. Newmann credited Turing for it. Independently, the concept was described in a patent application by Konrad Zuse as early as 1936.

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