Reconstructing the calculating machine Z3
The project of reconstructing Konrad Zuse's calculating machine Z3 was initiated by Prof. Dr. Raúl Rojas (FU Berlin) and Dr. Horst Zuse (TU Berlin).
Prof. Dr. Raúl Rojas was the technical leader and was in charge of the construction of the memory and the processor for which he defined the block architecture. As foundation for this served the patent application of the Z391 of Konrad Zuse. (published in: R. Rojas (ed.), Die Rechenmaschinen von Konrad Zuse, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1998).
On the basis of the block architecture Dr. Frank Darius (FU Berlin) conceptualized the concrete circuits with modern relays. The circuits were reviewed and adjusted to the existing hardware by Georg Heyne (head of the electronic laboratory of Fritz-Haber-Institute, Max-Planck-Gesellschaft). Wolfram Däumel (Fritz-Haber-Institute) designed the layout of the boards and Lothar Schönbein and Torsten Vetter (Fritz-Haber-Institute) did the microprogramming and assembly. With support of Bernhard Frötschl (FU Berlin) and Prof. Rojas Cüneyt Göktekin (FU Berlin) created a user interface to control the Z3 via PC instead of the Z3-console. In addition to that Cüneyt Göktekin implemented this virtual console in the programming languages Java and C. The debugging of hard- and software was performed by Dr. Darius, Bernhard Frötschl, Cüneyt Göktekin and Prof. Rojas.
With their teachers Thekla Lewandowki, Olaf Morgenbrod und Norbert Wagner pupils of the 1. Berufsschule Pankow welded the frames for the memory and the calculator unit. The pupils of the Konrad-Zuse-Schule in Hünfeld constructed together with their teacher Uwe Trautrims the punched tape reader and the punching machine.
Some pictures of the reconstruction of the Z3 can be seen here. The replica was presented on the 11.5.01 and 12.5.01 at the Zuse Institute Berlin.
