Konrad Zuse

Konrad Ernst Otto Zuse was a German civil engineer who began building computers in the late 1930s, funding the early machines with family money and commercial work. In May 1941, his Z3 became operational - the first functional program-controlled Turing-complete computer, though the achievement went almost entirely unnoticed outside Germany during the war. After 1939, the Nazi government supplied resources, and he kept working: the S2 became the first process control computer, and in 1941 he founded one of the earliest computer businesses, eventually producing the Z4, the world's first commercial computer. Between 1943 and 1945, he designed Plankalkül, the first high-level programming language. His influence seeped out slowly - IBM took an option on his patents in 1946, and the Z4 inspired Switzerland's first computer - but the war had buried him in history's blind spot, the man who started it all while no one was watching.