The Colossus and Code Breaking Task

Work 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?

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.

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4. What was the name of the place where this computer was created?Bletchlay 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?1500 of them

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

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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?Was much smaller in size

11. Roughly how many transistors might you find on a modern laptop?1 to two billion

12. What is the role of software?

To tell the computers what to do

13. There was no such thing as software when Colossus was developed. How did they get it to work?Physically re-write the computer.

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

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

16. The item which held the secret messages contained lots of holes. What was the purpose of those holes?Hole keeps binary data 1 and no holes- 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

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Ii process data

Iii output data

Most computers nowadays can also store data – Colossus couldn’t do this.

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