Co-developer of the Z3, one of the first computers, Schreyer also developed an electrical circuit to convert decimal to binary numbers. He was a German inventor and the son of the minister Paul Schreyer and Martha. When his father started to work in a parish in Mosbach, he attended school there. He earned his Abitur in 1933. He then worked as an intern at AEG.
He started to study electronic and telecommunications engineering at the Technical University of Berlin in 1934. Schreyer got to know Konrad Zuse in the fraternity AV Motiv in 1935 and then helped him to construct the computer Z1. In 1938 he earned his diploma and then worked as a graduate assistant at Prof. Wilhelm Stäblein's institute. He and Herbert Raabe belonged to the first assistants of Wilhelm Stäblein, who had worked at AEG's research division until 1936.
During WWII he was not drafted because his work was considered essential to the war effort. He worked on detection technology for unexploded ordinances. Schreyer then worked on the accelerometer for the V-2-rocket. He also worked on technology to convert the radar signal into an audio signal which the pilot of a fighter aircraft might recognize.
He advised Konrad Zuse to use electrical circuit technology to implement computers, but Zuse first considered it practically infeasible and then could not get the necessary funding. Up to 1942, Schreyer himself built an experimental model of a computer using 100 vacuum tubes, which was lost at the end of the war. In 1944 he built an electrical circuit to convert decimal to binary numbers.
