Micro Code

Michael's blog about teaching, hardware, software and the things inbetween

Excursion Report Part 3: The Zuse Z23

January 01, 2018 — Michael Engel

The third part of our excursion to Erlangen was centered around the Zuse Z23 machine, which I already described in a previous blog entry about the Long Night of Science I attended some months ago.

Again, the demonstration of the machine was simply great - once more, thanks a lot to Volkmar and Edwin for hosting us!

So, here are some more impressions of the Z23 (original size photos available on request). All pictures are licensed under the Creative Commons CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

The machine and its operator

Z23 total

The computer itself

Z23 computer

Core memory modules

Z23 core memory

Hand-wired backplane

Z23 backplane

Close-up of some Z23 modules

Z23 module close-up

A page of the Z23 schematics

Z23 schematic

The magnetic drum unit

Z23 magnetic drum

Close-up of the drum read-write heads

Z23 drum heads

The magnetics of the drum itself

Z23 drum

Close-up of the head driver electronics

Z23 amplifiers

Tags: Zuse, Z23, FAU, RRZE, Erlangen, Excursion