Even for the skeptics among us, it's hard to overstate the importance of this anniversary: 75 years ago - at the height of the Second World War - a 31-year-old German civil engineer called Konrad Zuse presented the Z3. It was the first programmable, automatic computer - and was widely viewed as the child of a family of machines we take for granted today, from desktop computers and mobile devices to the massive data centers controlling the world.
Compared to the phones and pads we carry in our pockets, however, the Z3 was huge. It was a cluster of glass-fronted wooden cabinets and wiring looms.
And its use was not intended for gaming or social networking on trams and in school yards, but for the German Aircraft Research Institute to perform statistical analyses of wing-flutter.
The Z3 was an entirely new concept, built well before the invention of transistors, as used in contemporary computer chips, and a good 40 years before Richard Feynman even proposed using quantum mechanics.
Instead, the Z3 was built with vacuum tubes as switching elements.
The Z3, zeros and ones
Helmut Schreyer, a colleague of Zuse's, suggested using vacuum tubes to achieve what we now call "flip-flops" - the ability to switch between two stable states. It's based on Boolean mathematical theory, which continues to underpin programming, whether you use the JavaScript language to build website applications, desktop software, or you're constructing a mega algorithm for online search or big data analysis.
Computer Inventor Konrad Zuse
Zuse, pictured in 1982, also developed Plankalkül, a programming language for engineering
So what Google, Facebook, Apple and others do today all started in wartime Germany. Like so much else. But there's only a small chance Zuse and Schreyer knew what they were doing.
"In 1941, probably no one - not even Zuse or one of the other inventors of computing machines - could have imagined how, decades later, such machines would have an impact on our everyday lives," says Matthias Hagen, a professor of big data analytics at Bauhaus University Weimar. "Not to mention how small, powerful and cheap these devices would get."
General Purpose Technology
As with the anniversary itself, it's equally hard to overstate the ubiquity of computers today. Computing - whether as hardware or software - is omnipresent.
Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet Inc. (formerly Google), has said these technologies will "disappear" - we will no longer see them - once they have infiltrated every aspect of our lives.
Essentially, we are already there. It was to be expected.
"Computers are one of the 'general purpose technologies,'" says Hagen.
That puts them in the same league as steam power, electricity and the internal combustion engine, as described by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in "Race Against The Machine."
"Computers are the GPT of our era," they wrote in 2011, "especially when combined with networks and labeled 'information and communication technology.'"
And, thanks to Konrad Zuse, computers and computer networks are what we have.
"Computers are a consciousness changing technology, perhaps the biggest one since the invention of fire," says Matt Black, a musician and creative technologies pioneer. "I read 'The Shockwave Rider' in 1976 and it blew my mind with a vision of computers and networks. Also 'The Selfish Gene' with its analogy between DNA code and computer code. Computers are nothing less than the next stage in our evolution."
How far we have come
If you're struggling to imagine the significance of the Z3 in 1941, try thinking back to your first computer and how it compares to the devices you use today. What was it? How much memory did it have? What was its processor speed?
