Konrad Zuse. View of the German engineer and computer pioneer Konrad Zuse (1910-1996) at work. Working as a statistician, he built his first computer, the Z1, in his spare time during 1934- 1936. It had mechanical switches and a punched tape input. He improved his design to create the Z3 computer of 1941 which had 2600 electromechanical relays and a keyboard input. His Z4 had a mechanical memory, and was the only early Zuse design to survive air raids during World War 2. In 1958 his company produced the first transistorized computer, the Z22. Zuse also developed a machine (the L1) to perform logical calculations and the Plankalkul computer language.