Konrad Zuse

Konrad Zuse, born in Berlin, was a man ahead of his time, which, for a German in the 1930s and 40s, was either incredibly impressive or just incredibly complicated. While the rest of the world was busy with, well, other things, Zuse was holed up in his parents' apartment, then a series of increasingly less bombed-out workshops, building machines that could calculate. You know, for science.

His crowning achievement, the Z3, completed in 1941, was essentially the world's first functional, programmable computer. It was electromechanical, not electronic, but it could churn through binary arithmetic like a pro. Imagine explaining that to the Wehrmacht high command, who probably just wanted better bomb trajectories, not a glimpse into the future of spreadsheets.

Zuse’s wartime efforts, thankfully, were more about crunching numbers than creating chaos. He even designed the first high-level programming language, Plankalkül, though it remained largely unpublished until after the war. So, while others were busy building empires, Zuse was building the tools to manage them, eventually.

Despite the very German name and the rather unfortunate historical context, there is absolutely no indication whatsoever that Konrad Zuse was anything but thoroughly gentile. His contribution to computer science, however, is universally recognized, making him a true Kvell-worthy pioneer, even if he didn't eat gefilte fish.