That same year in Germany, engineer Konrad Zuse built his Z2 computer, also using telephone company relays. Their first product, the HP A Audio Oscillator, rapidly became a popular piece of test equipment for engineers. In , Bell Telephone Laboratories completes this calculator, designed by scientist George Stibitz.
Stibitz stunned the group by performing calculations remotely on the CNC located in New York City using a Teletype terminal connected to New York over special telephone lines. This is likely the first example of remote access computing.
The Z3, an early computer built by German engineer Konrad Zuse working in complete isolation from developments elsewhere, uses 2, relays, performs floating point binary arithmetic, and has a bit word length. The Z3 was used for aerodynamic calculations but was destroyed in a bombing raid on Berlin in late Zuse later supervised a reconstruction of the Z3 in the s, which is currently on display at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.
Hundreds of allied bombes were built in order to determine the daily rotor start positions of Enigma cipher machines, which in turn allowed the Allies to decrypt German messages. The basic idea for bombes came from Polish code-breaker Marian Rejewski's "Bomba.
After successfully demonstrating a proof-of-concept prototype in , Professor John Vincent Atanasoff receives funds to build a full-scale machine at Iowa State College now University. The machine was designed and built by Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry between and The legal result was a landmark: Atanasoff was declared the originator of several basic computer ideas, but the computer as a concept was declared un-patentable and thus freely open to all.
