In September 2024, the Switzerland LMAG visited newly built facilities of The ENTER Museum in Derendingen, Switzerland, which is dedicated to the history of technology – from the first radio station to the computers of the present day. The highlight of the visit was a presentation by Dr. Horst Zuse, the son of Konrad Zuse, a pioneering computer scientist who developed the Zuse Z3, one of the first electromechanical digital computers.
The computer was designed in 1938 and completed in 1941 in Berlin. It was built with 2,600 relays, implementing a 22-bit word length that operated at clock frequency of about a 5-10 Hz. Program code was stored on punched film tape. The computer was not used in the German war effort. Dr. Zuse described the sales of numerous Zuse computers following the war including one delivered to ETH Zurich in 1950 launching their computer department. The museum hosts a full scale working replica of the Zuse Z3 built by Dr. Christof Traber.
