The Colossus and Code Breaking TaskWork your way through the Colossus movie and find the answers to the questions below. 1. In which year was the very first electronic digital computer created?

In 1944

2. What was the name given to this computer?

Colossus

3. Go on the internet and find a picture of this computer. Copy and paste it into your worksheet.

4. What was the name of the place where this computer was created?

Bletchley Park

5. Go on the internet and find a picture of this place. Copy and paste it into your worksheet.

6. What was the main role of this computer?

Break secret war codes

7. Colossus used valves. What was the role of these valves?

To do the processing (cracking the codes)

8. How many valves were used on each of the 10 Colossus machines?

1,500 of them

9. What were the two main problems caused by using the valves?

i. They were large

ii. You needed thousands of them

10. Many years later transistors were invented. How did transistors help in the development of new computers?

The transistor does the same job as the old, larger valve, but its absolutely tiny in comparison.

11. Roughly how many transistors might you find on a modern laptop?

About 2 billion transistors

12. What is the role of software?

Tell computers what to do

13. There was no such thing as software when Colossus was developed. How did they get it to work?

Someone had to physically to re-wire the computer

14. How long might it have taken to re-wire Colossus?

Weeks to re-wire

15. After rewiring Colossus it had to be given the secret message to decode. What was used to provide it with the message?

They were fed into Colossus using punched paper tape

16. The item which held the secret messages contained lots of holes. What was the purpose of those holes?

A hole is binary 1. And no hole is binary 0

17. Even though Colossus looks primitive to us now, it effectively does the same thing as a modern computer today. Write down the three things that all computers can do:

I Input data

Ii Process data

Iii Output

Most computers nowadays can also store data Colossus couldnt do this.

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