user: The Analyser, made by Charles Babbage, if it were real, how would the world be today?

assistant: If Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine had been completed and put into use, it would have revolutionized computing and had a significant impact on the world.

The Analytical Engine was designed to be a programmable general-purpose computer that could perform a wide range of calculations. It was intended to be powered by steam and used punched cards to input data and instructions. Babbage's design included features such as conditional branching, looping, and storage, which are now standard in modern computer architectures.

If the Analytical Engine had been built and put into use, it would have had a profound impact on industries that relied heavily on calculations, such as finance, engineering, and scientific research. It would have accelerated the process of data analysis and made it possible to perform complex computations much faster than was previously possible. The Analytical Engine may have even been able to contribute to the development of early artificial intelligence.

Furthermore, the Analytical Engine could have had significant impacts on society as a whole. The development of a powerful general-purpose computer in the 19th century could have led to the creation of new industries and technologies that we can't even imagine today. It could have also facilitated the development of electronic communication and advanced cryptography, which could have had significant implications for politics and international relations.

In conclusion, if the Analytical Engine had been completed and put into use, it could have accelerated technological progress and had far-reaching effects on society, changing the course of history.

user: I've heard that the first digital computer that was made was the Z3. What can you tell me about that?

assistant: The Z3 was the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer, completed in 1941. It was designed by Konrad Zuse in 1938 and built in Berlin, Germany. It supersedes the Z1 and Z2, which were completed in 1938 and 1940 respectively, but unreliable in operation.

The Z3 had 2,600 relays, a 22-bit word length and a clock frequency of about 5–10 Hz. A single addition took about 0.8 seconds, and a single multiplication took ~3 seconds. For reference, most modern-day computers run at >3GHz, and can perform billions of computations every second.  The Z3's Program code was stored on punched film, and initial values were entered manually. It is Turing-complete and has loops, but does not have conditional branching.

The Z3 wasn't actually used very much. One of the few programs written was a "Program to Compute a Complex Matrix" built to solve wing flutter problems. When Zuse asked the German government for funding to replace the relays with fully electronic switches, it was denied for being "not war-important" as World War II was ongoing, and the original was destroyed on 21 December 1943 during an Allied bombardment of Berlin. The Z3 was re-created in 1961 and that recreation still exists at Deutsches Museum in Munich today, and another modern reconstruction was built from 1997-2003 and was presented in 2010 at the Konrad Zuse Museum in Hünfeld.

While the Z3 was certainly a milestone, it would take until about the 1980s before personal computers became the norm, and until the 2000s/2010s before the Internet and social media really exploded and became what we know today.

See more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)