[14] In 1969, Zuse suggested the concept of a computation-based universe in his book Rechnender Raum (Calculating Space).

Zuse attended the Collegium Hosianum in Braunsberg, and in 1923, the family moved to Hoyerswerda, where he passed his Abitur in 1928, qualifying him to enter university.

[21] After graduation, Zuse worked for the Ford Motor Company, using his artistic skills in the design of advertisements.

[23]: 418  Working in his parents' apartment in 1936, he produced his first attempt, the Z1, a floating-point binary mechanical calculator with limited programmability, reading instructions from a perforated 35 mm film.

On 30 January 1944, the Z1 and its original blueprints were destroyed with his parents' flat and many neighbouring buildings by a British air raid in World War II.

[18] In September 1940 Zuse presented the Z2, covering several rooms in the parental flat, to experts of the Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt (DVL; German Research Institute for Aviation).

In 1940, the German government began funding him and his company through the Aerodynamische Versuchsanstalt (AVA, Aerodynamic Research Institute, forerunner of the DLR),[25] which used his work for the production of glide bombs.

However, Turing-completeness was never considered by Zuse (who was unaware of Turing's work and had practical applications in mind) and only demonstrated in 1998 (see History of computing hardware).

The Z3, the first fully operational electromechanical computer, was partially financed by German government-supported DVL, which wanted their extensive calculations automated.

A request by his co-worker Helmut Schreyer—who had helped Zuse build the Z3 prototype in 1938[29]—for government funding for an electronic successor to the Z3 was denied as "strategically unimportant".

[23]: 428 On 3 February 1945, aerial bombing caused devastating destruction in the Luisenstadt, the area around Oranienstraße, including neighbouring houses.

The partially finished, telephone relay-based Z4 computer was then packed and moved from Berlin on 14 February, arriving in Göttingen approximately two weeks later.

[36] In 1947, according to the memoirs of the German computer pioneer Heinz Billing from the Max Planck Institute for Physics, there was a meeting between Alan Turing and Konrad Zuse in Göttingen.

Participants were Womersley, Turing, Porter from England and a few German researchers like Zuse, Walther, and Billing.

[44] Heinz Rutishauser, one of the inventors of ALGOL, wrote: "The very first attempt to devise an algorithmic language was undertaken in 1948 by K. Zuse.

Donald Knuth suggested a thought experiment: What might have happened had the bombing not taken place, and had the PhD thesis accordingly been published as planned?

It was demonstrated at the 1961 Hanover Fair,[45] and became well known also outside of the technical world thanks to Frieder Nake's pioneering computer art work.

[45] In 1967, Zuse suggested that the universe itself is running on a cellular automaton or similar computational structure (digital physics); in 1969, he published the book Rechnender Raum (translated into English as Calculating Space).

The structure is based on a gear drive that employs rotary motion (e.g. provided by a crank) to assemble modular components from a storage space, elevating a tube-shaped tower; the process is reversible, and inverting the input direction will deconstruct the tower and store the components.