In 1936, Zuse quit his job in airplane construction to build the Z1. Zuse is said to have used "thin metal strips" and perhaps "metal cylinders" or glass plates to construct Z1. There were probably no commercial relays in it (though the Z3 is said to have used a few telephone relays).

The Z1 uses a digital incrementer and a set of conditions which are translated into microinstructions for the exponent and mantissa units, as well as for the memory blocks. Microinstructions select one out of 12 layers in a machine with a 3D mechanical structure of binary mechanical elements.

HP Z is a series of professional workstation computers developed by Hewlett-Packard. The first-generation desktop products were announced in March 2009, replacing the HP 9000 xw series.

In 1955 the Z4 was sold to the French-German Research Institute of Saint-Louis (Institut franco-allemand de recherches de Saint-Louis) in Saint-Louis, close to Basel, and in 1960 transferred to the German Museum in Munich. The Z4 was used for calculations for work on the Grande Dixence Dam.