In April 1941, while bombs fell on Berlin, a 30-year-old civil engineer named Konrad Zuse filed German patent application Z 391 (later refiled as Z-23139 IX/42m) describing a machine that should not have existed for another decade. The Z3, completed in his parents' living room on May 12, 1941 — exactly 85 years ago today — was the world's first fully automatic, program-controlled, freely programmable computer using binary floating-point arithmetic. Every one of those adjectives matters, and together they describe a machine that beat ENIAC by five years and the Harvard Mark I by three.

Zuse's patent application — known internally as the "Verfahren zur selbsttätigen Durchführung von Rechnungen mit Hilfe von Rechenmaschinen" ("Method for the automatic execution of calculations with the help of computing machines") — described concepts that read like a modern computer architecture textbook:

• Binary representation of all numbers (Zuse rejected decimal because relay circuits naturally have two states)
• Floating-point arithmetic with a 14-bit mantissa, 7-bit exponent, and sign bit — essentially IEEE 754 in embryo, 44 years before the standard
• Separation of memory and processor — the Z3 had 64 words of relay-based memory distinct from its arithmetic unit
• Microprogramming — complex operations like square root were built from sequences of simpler micro-operations
• Program loading via punched film — Zuse used discarded 35mm movie film as the program tape, punching holes with a hand-built device
• Exception handling for undefined operations like division by zero — the machine could signal errors rather than producing garbage

The Z3 contained 2,600 telephone relays, ran at 5–10 Hz, and could perform a multiplication in about 3 seconds. By modern standards, glacial. But it was Turing-complete — proven retroactively in 1998 by Raúl Rojas, who showed that Zuse's instruction set, though lacking conditional branching, could simulate any computation through clever use of self-modifying address arithmetic.

The patent was rejected. The German Patent Office examiner ruled in 1967 — twenty-six years after filing — that the invention lacked sufficient "inventive step." Zuse fought the rejection for decades and lost. Meanwhile, the Z3 itself was destroyed in a 1943 Allied bombing raid on Berlin. No working unit survived the war. Zuse's company Zuse KG eventually built dozens of successors (the Z4 survived and ran at ETH Zürich until 1955), but the original was rebuilt only as a museum replica in 1961, now at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.

The modern connection runs deeper than "first computer." Zuse's 1945 Plankalkül — a programming language he designed in hiding in the Bavarian Alps after fleeing Berlin — included structured data types, arrays, records, conditional execution, and even a concept resembling object-oriented assertions. It predated FORTRAN by 12 years and ALGOL by 13. Because it was never implemented during his lifetime and not published until 1972, every concept Zuse invented had to be reinvented independently.

There's a particular cruelty in Zuse's story: isolation by war meant his work didn't influence Anglo-American computing at all. Von Neumann, Turing, Aiken, and Mauchly built parallel architectures without knowing he existed. We celebrate ENIAC and Colossus as origins, but a Berlin civil engineer with relay scraps and movie film had already crossed the finish line — alone, unfunded, and unrecognized.