What's this about?
The ZCOM computer museum in Hoyerswerda, dedicated to Konrad Zuse, faces closure for lack of funding.
Who was Konrad Zuse?
The builder of the Z3, completed in Berlin in 1941 — the first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. It was electromechanical, used binary floating point, and was destroyed in an air raid in 1943. He worked in near-isolation from the Anglo-American effort, and his priority is widely accepted but not widely known outside Germany, partly because the machine's destruction left little to point at.
Why is it worth noticing?
HN 151 points, 75 comments
- Computing history museums are chronically underfunded because the artifacts look like old office equipment to a funding body.
- It sits oddly well against the Steam teraleak the same day — two entirely different arguments about who preserves the record.
- Hoyerswerda is a small city in Saxony, which is part of the problem: the museum is not where the visitors are.