Prussia wasn’t a state with an army, it was an army with a state. And when Frederick demanded French replace German cuisine, the essence replaced the duck.
I’m starving, where’s the duck?
It is in the essence, now get back in line.
Are you sure this is duck? Looks like tap water.
Eat or don’t eat the noumenal duck remains forever beyond the spoon. You can’t afford the certainty.
I hate Nazis. Just one of the many reasons why is how classification and words are turned into their weapons. They “win” by changing the rules until everyone else is, by their own definition, losers.
“Get that car’s license plate number!”
A museum in Berlin is abusing a technical claim of “first” for a contest where they wrote the rules suspiciously. On any and every neutral axis of electronic, operational, programmable, general-purpose, stored-program, the actual trophy sits in Iowa, or Bletchley, or Philadelphia, or Manchester. Berlin wins only the category they created called “fully functional programmable automatic” to fit one machine in 1941 Nazi Germany, promoted by the people who need it to win in 2026.
For those who decide at the last minute:
May 12, 1941, is considered the birth of the first fully functional computer, the Z3. On this day, Konrad Zuse presented his Z3 relay computer to a group of scientists. To mark the 85th anniversary, Horst Zuse will give a lecture on the development of the Z3 and the computer innovations of his father, Konrad Zuse.
Participation is free; all you need is a museum admission ticket.
#Computer #coding #Museum #technology
“Considered.” Cute. “Fully functioning”. Please.
The claim of a never-operational Z3 being Turing-complete is from a single 1998 paper whose own author admits it’s just an impractical theory for a demonstration machine destroyed in WWII. The German “Gesellschaft für Informatik” admits this too while building a virtual one because the Munich replica had to be shut down for fire safety. The truth runs opposite to any claims of the Reich’s Z3 birthing anything. But you know, for Germans who gotta find something in 1941 Berlin to get away with being proud of something, I guess this fits their bill. I mean, who knew a German museum in 2026 would file the serial numbers off Nazi war research to claim the “birth” of a “fully functional computer”?
Let’s cut the propaganda and speak plain English for a moment, because the actual first functional computers were not made in Germany.
The Z3 was cobbled together from old ideas and marketed as research. The German Reich office known as DVL paid Zuse to automate the calculations that enabled Luftwaffe airframes to carry heavier bombs. You know, they needed heavier bombs to kill more civilians. This very same DVL provided the low-pressure chamber for the high-altitude experiments at Dachau in 1942, experiments in which 70 to 80 of approximately 200 prisoners died. The monsters running the DVL are quite a “birth moment” context if you know it.
And what was the birth? What new principle was brought into this world by the Z3?
NOTHING. ZILCH. NADA.
Its binary arithmetic came from Leibniz; its logic from Boole; its relays from the telephone exchange; and its punched-tape control from Jacquard and the Hollerith line, specifically the very Dehomag machines that the SS operated in the camps (Dachau included) to register prisoners and run them through to the gas chamber by number.
The Z3 couldn’t even perform conditional branching based on its own results. Any claims of “first computer” are transparent retroactive PR, thinly substantiated, nationally flattering, and only theoretically “upgraded” to Turing completeness on paper in 1998 by Rojas, who later helped build the replica.
First ahead of what, exactly? The phrase “fully functional” doesn’t even make sense. Functioning in what capacity? Full of what?
Electronic earlier examples the museum is trying hard to omit: the Atanasoff-Berry Computer, Iowa, conceived in 1937 and built by 1942, running on vacuum tubes while Zuse was still clacking relays. Unlike the Z3, that claim was actually tested independently in a court. In 1973 a US federal judge invalidated the ENIAC patent and ruled the electronic computer was derived from Atanasoff. The decision was never appealed. No German court ever ruled anything of the sort for Zuse, because the title was never evidence. It was always a particular form of nationalism sneaking into PR.
Electronic, operational, and programmed examples? Well, obviously we have the Colossus, Bletchley Park, 1943, breaking live German ciphers in daily wartime service while the Z3 sat in Zuse’s flat as a demonstrator and the real flutter production ran on his separate S1 and S2 machines at Henschel. Colossus would lose a “first” race for one reason only. Britain kept it secret. The same disappearing act that lets the Germans promote the Z3 claim, except Britain has receipts unlike self-shredding evidence-allergic 1945 Germans.
What about electronic, general-purpose, and Turing-complete in actual hardware, with conditional branching included? That’s the ENIAC, 1945. Everything the Z3 was falsely and retroactively awarded on paper in 1998, ENIAC proved in operation, while the Z3 was never deployed to production use.
And if we want to name a machine during this era that was the mother of every computer you have ever touched: the Manchester Baby, 1948, the first stored-program computer, followed by Cambridge’s EDSAC in regular service by 1949. That is the more accurate “first”.
The Z3 doesn’t hold a candle. It was obscure research about assembly of known parts, a demonstrator the institute never deployed, secret, then rubble, then unknown for twenty years, so it not only contributed nothing to the computers that actually got built and used around the same period, it’s a form of unverifiable revisionism. Its only real use ever seems to be the modern nationalist propaganda campaigns that obscure how it never really was used.
Here is the history fact that should end the argument. The engineering profession’s own milestone records list the Z3 among the candidates and then disqualify it in a single sentence: built for narrow engineering sums, not a stored-program machine because it held its instructions outside itself on perforated film, and hardly general-purpose in any normal sense.
The Germans that ought to be Zuse’s loudest champion name his machine in the contest and rule it out, TWICE.
The original was bombed to rubble; the historical narrative stems from Zuse’s own memoirs; the replica currently on display belongs to his son (on convenient loan from the son who also is honored with an anniversary lecture about his family “win” under the NS); and the proof of universality comes from the very man who helped build that replica for the son. Integrity breach alert.
Stakeholders shouldn’t be allowed to set their own interest rates. Or is this perhaps just for those impulsive types in Berlin who prefer records shredded so their Nazi-era computer history can be served cold and without the facts?
| Machine | Electronic | Branching | Used | “Fully functional programmable automatic” |
| Babbage Analytical Engine, 1837 design | No | YES, by design | No. Unbuilt | No |
| Aiken Mark I, Harvard 1937 design | No | No | YES, from 1944 | No |
| Stibitz relay binary, Bell Labs 1937 | No | No | YES, from 1940 | No |
| Zuse Z1, Berlin 1938 | No | No | No. Unreliable | No |
| Zuse Z3, Berlin 1941 | No, relays | No | No. Demo | Did someone say FIFA Peace Prize? |
| Atanasoff-Berry, Iowa 1942 | YES, tubes | No | No, never finished | No |
| Colossus, Bletchley 1943 | YES, tubes | Limited | YES, daily in the war | No |
| ENIAC, Philadelphia 1945 | YES, tubes | YES | YES, ballistics | No |
| Manchester Baby, 1948 | YES, tubes | YES | YES, foundational | No |
The title has to be won in a public assessment, not self-awarded or even through a corrupted process. A real assessment in America looked like this.
Computer architect Gordon Bell refers to the judgment, which invalidated the ENIAC patent, as the “disinvention” of the computer.
His point is that a 1973 ruling invalidated the ENIAC patent on the ground that the ideas derived from Atanasoff. The court left a foundational invention owned by no one. Put the Z3 in a fair courtroom and let’s see how that turns out.
On March 1, 2026, Iranian drones directly struck two AWS data centers in the UAE and damaged a third facility in Bahrain, the first time a major US tech company’s data center was disrupted by military action. The IRGC claimed it, citing the centers’ role supporting US military and intelligence networks. Then on March 31 Iran formally labeled 18 US technology companies as legitimate military targets, including Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, Apple, Meta, Oracle, Cisco, and IBM.
The AWS strikes took down two of the three availability zones in the UAE region and one in Bahrain, and because multiple zones failed at once, standard redundancy models failed. Cloud redundancy is engineered against independent failures: a transformer dies, a switch fails, a zone floods. The company has designed resilience to failures as uncorrelated, so the odds of two at once are the product of two small numbers.
That’s not how warfare works.
BBC Verify analysis found Iranian strikes have damaged somewhere between 20 and 28 American military sites across eight countries since Trump launched Operation Epic Fury on February 28…
A wartime adversary creates a correlated failure on purpose. It hits the redundancy in the same cycles, and the independence assumption that the whole design rests on is gone. Availability zones sit tens of kilometers apart so synchronous replication can balance being fast and inexpensive. That proximity is a feature against random failure and a target package against an area weapon. American resilience, despite the lessons of 9/11, designs fit inside a single firing range.
As many of us know first-hand from working in the trenches of the early 2000s datacenter build-outs, cross-region failover exists. Yet when Iran attacked, AWS told customers to back up and migrate to other regions manually, and data-residency law pins much government and regional data to the region it lives in. The outage took down Abu Dhabi Commercial Bank, Emirates NBD, First Abu Dhabi Bank, Snowflake, and Careem.
Manual migration in 2026 isn’t on anyone’s plan.
Now consider the exposure of the current centralized “giga” strategy of American AI data build-outs. In particular, the Anthropic deal with xAI is a national security disaster on multiple levels. Training is worse than serving, and xAI (literally named Colossus) is the world’s largest single-site vulnerable AI training installation, near 2 GW with about 555,000 GPUs on one Memphis site running on on-site gas generation.
Have you seen those videos of the Russian gas sites burning after drone strikes? In the fog of war, xAI is building the largest fully operational single-coherent cluster, which means it is one synchronous fabric with no failover at all.
None. Nothing.
Lose even a tiny piece of the site, lose an entire run. The “Tesla Mad Max” mentality to make it the fastest and most polluting trainer on earth makes it the most concentrated single point of failure on the earth.
One site. One power source.
Anthropic is inherently vulnerable as it runs on this over-concentration of power. It has contracted up to 5 GW from Amazon, with the first gigawatt expected by the end of 2026, and just took all of xAI’s Colossus 1 in Memphis to serve Claude capacity. That suggests all of Anthropic data has no privacy protection from Elon Musk and Trump. But that’s privacy. In terms of availability and integrity, it’s extremely exposed to catastrophic failure.
The Amazon infrastructure that was struck in the Gulf and the single Memphis cluster are both how Claude gets served, vulnerably and controversially. The Elon Musk rushed plant design in particular has been firing huge, deadly plumes of pollution at the neighborhood, which makes the controversial datacenter strategy stand out even more.
We’ve been talking about rising asymmetric threats on critical infrastructure for years, although subtle, around the world. From a drone in the Gulf, blackmail by Russian hackers, bomb on a pipeline, Volt Typhoon on the grid, disgruntled Russian developer, or contractors in San Francisco and Berlin.
When Elon Musk cosplays being a ruthless Emperor, think about why Napoleon Bonaparte was such an inhumane and incompetent disaster (killing his own troops faster than the enemy could). When someone says the Pentagon is relying on the biggest and most concentrated compute ever for identification and targeting, feel free to say it’s time we talk about why “Mr. Blownapart” ships went to the bottom of the sea.
Or if you prefer more modern military lessons, Mussolini marched into north Africa with no go plans and several hundred thousands of his best Italian soldiers. Then the Allied Operation Compass in February 1941 used only around 30K troops to wreck the entire fascist army and take 130,000 prisoners in Libya and Egypt. Wingate’s tiny Gideon Force, using just a few thousand men, punched even harder and took the surrender of tens of thousands of Italian troops in Ethiopia.
One element I haven’t discussed here, which would significantly shift the threat model, is whether these “datacenters” of empty space waiting for power are meant to be pivoted into human incarceration as fascism has done in the past. Massive concentration camps of political prisoners certainly would make more sense for the rushed build-out economics, and remove all the worry about supplying them with infrastructure like water and power (scarcity being the point). US datacenter construction has been on pace to overtake what the country spends building offices, whether these massive concentration halls are filled with computers or anyone Trump points his finger at.
The simple answer is that the government of Hitler publicly classified Jazz as Jewish music, even though it came from American Blacks. The German news site DW emphasizes the “bravery” of non-Jewish kids in Nazi Germany who “dared to be themselves” by wearing plaid jackets to meet in cafes to keep listening to the forbidden “degenerate” and fremdländisch (alien) tunes.
…not all young people in Nazi Germany supported the regime’s ideology, and for the Swing Youth, jazz music became a vehicle for rebellion. Its members tried to distinguish themselves from Nazi youth movements by appropriating American fashion trends and names. They wore their hair long and dressed in plaid jackets to meet in cafes and clubs playing swing, a jazz sub-genre. They were also said to have greeted one another with the phrase: “Swing Heil!”
The bans on Jazz weren’t strictly enforced, is another way to put it, for those who weren’t Jewish. And the Nazis even remixed Jazz tunes as propaganda.
The Jews of USA have asked Eddie Cantor to write a new version of his famous old-timer “Makin’ Whoopee.” In one of his latest programs on the air, he sang the following song. (Singing) Another war, another profit, another Jewish business trick, another season, another reason for makin’ whoopee. A lot of dough, a lot of gold. The British Empire’s being sold. We’re in the money thanks to Frankie. We’re making whoopee. Washington is our ghetto, Roosevelt our king. Democracy is our motto. Think what a war can bring. We throw our German names away. We are the kikes of USA. You are the goys, folks. We are the boys, folks. We’re making whoopee.
Only towards the end of 1942, as it became clear Germany was going to lose WWII, did Goebbels really clamp down on Germans enjoying Jazz.