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Z4 considered the oldest preserved digital computer in the world and one of those machines that takes up a whole room, runs on magnetic tapes, and needs multiple people to operate. Today it sits in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, unused. Until now, historians and curators only had a limited knowledge of its secrets because the manual was lost long ago.The computer’s inventor, Konrad Zuse, first began building it for the Nazis in 1942, then refused its use in the VI and V2 rocket program. Instead, he fled to a small town in Bavaria and stowed the computer in a barn until the end of the war. It wouldn’t see operation until 1950. The Z4 proved to be a very reliable and impressive computer for its time. With its large instruction set it was able to calculate complicated scientific programs and was able to work during the night without supervision, which was unheard of for this time.
These qualities made the Zuse Z4 particularly useful to the Institute of Applied Mathematics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), where the computer performed advanced calculations for Swiss engineers in the early 50s. Around 100 jobs were carried out with the Z4 between 1950 and 1955. These included calculations on the trajectory of rockets… on aircraft wings… and on flutter vibrations, an operation requiring 800 hours machine time.
René Boesch, one of the airplane researchers working on the Z4 in the 50s kept a copy of the manual among his papers, and it was there that his daughter, Evelyn Boesch, also an ETH researcher, discovered it. View it online here: https://www.e-manuscripta.ch/zut/content/pageview/2856521
The full story of the computer’s development, operation, and the rediscovery of its only known copy of operating instructions you can view here: https://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm/247521-discovery-user-manual-of-the-oldest-surviving-computer-in-the-world/fulltext
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