Konrad Zuse's Helix Tower [pdf]
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The Hacker News community shares and discusses a PDF about Konrad Zuse's Helix Tower, a conceptual design for an automated construction and deconstruction system, highlighting Zuse's innovative and lesser-known contributions.
Snapshot generated from the HN discussion
Discussion Activity
Light discussionFirst comment
4m
Peak period
3
Day 5
Avg / period
2
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- 01Story posted
Oct 7, 2025 at 4:44 PM EDT
about 2 months ago
Step 01 - 02First comment
Oct 7, 2025 at 4:48 PM EDT
4m after posting
Step 02 - 03Peak activity
3 comments in Day 5
Hottest window of the conversation
Step 03 - 04Latest activity
Oct 13, 2025 at 1:42 AM EDT
about 1 month ago
Step 04
Generating AI Summary...
Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns
For previous art (but not built until much later) was Charles Babbage. Later came ENIAC, which is much more what we identify today with a computer.
Also the electromechanical computers of Howard Aiken (made by IBM at Harvard, hence "Harvard architecture"), which were conceived as a modern implementation of the ideas of Babbage, and which preceded ENIAC, resembled much more a modern computer than ENIAC.
ENIAC, as actually said by its name (Electronic Numerical Integrator) was an electronic and digital version of the mechanical analog computers known as "differential analyzers", e.g. that of Vannevar Bush.
ENIAC was not as special purpose as the British Colossus, but it was not as general-purpose as the electromechanical computers of Aiken and Zuse that preceded it, which were really controlled by writing programs, not by reconfiguring a bunch of connections. ENIAC was more like an FPGA than like a computer.
The main connection between ENIAC and later electronic computers was in the digital electronic circuits used to built it, however even those were not completely original, as they have used information from the circuits used in the previous special-purpose electronic computer of John Vincent Atanasoff at Iowa State University, which in turn were based on the digital circuits invented in UK for the necessities of nuclear and elementary particle physics research during the decade preceding WWII.
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2020/12/where-did-combin...
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