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.

B

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

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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?Breaking secret codes.

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

For Processing.

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 are to large.

ii. You need a lot of them so they can work properly.

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

It was smaller then the valves.

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

About 2 Billiion.

12. What is the role of software?

The software tells the computer 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 rewire it because the secret code changed.

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

Each column was a single character, a hole is a 1 and a blank space is a 0.

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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 couldn’t do this.

This lesson I learned that about the first computer and about how computers changed from 1944 to now-days and also how quicker are our computers. the Colossus had to be rewired for different codes but our computers don’t have to be rewired and also Colossus couldn’t store data but because the computer doesn't store data and has to be rewired you cant hack it.

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