[hutzlibu]

"I think Zuse seems very unsung"

Of what I know, this might be, because he worked for the Nazis and his prototypes were mostly destroyed in the war and somewhat forgotten and seemed to have not been influential to the general branch of computing.

[adrian_b]

There is an indirect influence of Zuse in the daily life of most programmers.

The "for" keyword used in the "for" loops comes from Algol 60, which inherited it from its predecessor from 1958, IAL.

The "for" loops were introduced in IAL by Heinz Rutishauser, who had used "fuer" loops (i.e. "for" in German) for the first time in 1951, when he had published a paper describing a computer programming language, 3 years before Fortran introduced the "do" loops in 1954.

In the Rutishauser paper from 1951, he quotes Zuse with his paper about a programming language (published in 1948) as the inspiration for his own improved programming language, which included the "for" loops.

[mhh__]

Oh sure. I know why, but I find computer engineering a bit more interesting than theory so I'd rather read about him than quite a few others.

[TheOtherHobbes]

Von Braun also worked for the Nazis.

Interesting to speculate what would have happened if Zuse had been paper-clipped to the US and given a huge budget.

[schlupa]

One funny anecdote about Zuse during the war was that he managed to save his Z4 because it was named as V4 in the paperwork. The wehrmacht officers thought it was one of these retaliation weapon V1, V2, V3 so V4 was very important and got high priority to be hidden away somewhere.