LAUSR

Discusses the work of Konrad Zuse and Heinrich Billing: two German pioneers of digital computers. Zuse (1910–1995) used telephone relays as opposed to vacuum tubes as the active computing elements in his early Z-series computers, and the programs were executed from an external tape; however, the Z3 was arguably the first implementation of a Universal Turing Machine.1 Billing (1914–2017) was awarded the Konrad Zuse Medal for creating the first magnetic drum storage (but also see 4), and he developed the first stored-program computer in Germany (the G2 in his G-series of computers, also known as the G€ottingen computers). I will briefly review Zuse’s and Billing’s lives, their series of computers, Zuse’s high-level programming language, and Billing’s storage drum. I will conclude with Zuse’s speculations about the computational nature of the universe and Billing’s contributions to gravity wave astronomy.