When the German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse built the world’s first programmable computer in war time Berlin, it performed floating point arithmetic at a clock speed of between 5 and 10 Hz. The machine was deemed unnecessary for the German war effort and never used for everyday calculations. In 1943, it was destroyed during an Allied air raid. Nevertheless, the Z3, as it was called, gave Zuse a strong claim to be the inventor of the modern computer. After the war, the clock speed of computers i...