Managing PCS Through Policy: Review and Ways to Extend Lifespan

On May 12, 1941 a young German named Konrad Zuse presented his latest development to a small, select group of people. Unnoticed by the public, the student of civil engineering at Berlin’s Technical University had succeeded in making his dream a reality. It was called the “Z3,” the world’s first functioning programmable calculator, and it marked the start of a new era. The operational target that Zuse accomplished was to replace the dull necessity of manual calculations with a machine. The mechanical contraption, made of 40,000 components and 2,500 telephone relays, was able to save 64 numbers in its memory and execute basic arithmetic operations (Konrad Zuse Internet Archive 2001).