[Edit] Zuse the entrepreneur

In 1946 Zuse founded the world's first computer startup company: the Zuse-Ingenieurbüro Hopferau. Venture capital was raised through eth Zürich and an ibm option on Zuse's patents.

Zuse founded another company, Zuse KG, in 1949. The Z4 was finished and delivered to the ETH Zürich, Switzerland in September 1950. At that time, it was the only working computer in continental Europe, and the second computer in the world to be sold, only beat by the BINAC. Other computers, all numbered with a leading Z, were built by Zuse and his company. Notable are the Z11, which was sold to the optics industry and to universities, and the Z22, the first computer with a memory based on magnetic storage.^[2]

By 1967, the Zuse KG had built a total of 251 computers. Due to financial problems, it was then sold to Siemens.

[Edit] Calculating Space

In 1967 Zuse also suggested that the universe itself is running on a grid of computers (digital physics); in 1969 he published the book Rechnender Raum (translated into English as Calculating Space). This idea has attracted a lot of attention, since there is no physical evidence against Zuse's thesis. Edward Fredkin (1980s), Juergen Schmidhuber (1990s), Stephen Wolfram (A New Kind of Science) and others have expanded on it.

Zuse received several awards for his work. After he retired, he focused on his hobby, painting. Zuse died on December 18, 1995 in Hünfeld, Germany, near Fulda.