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?
The first electronic digital computer was created in 1944.

2. What was the name given to this computer?

Colossus was the name given to that computer.

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?
The name of the place where this computer was created was called 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?

The main role of this computer was to end World War 2 by cracking and
solving secret war codes.
7. Colossus used valves. What was the role of these valves?
The role of these valves was to do the processing. (Cracking the codes.)
8. How many valves were used on each of the 10 Colossus machines?
1,500 valves were used on each of the 10 Colossus machines.
9. What were the two main problems caused by using the valves?
The valves are very large!
You also needs thousands of them.

10. Many years later transistors were invented. How did transistors help in
the development of new computers?
2

The transistors does the same job as the valve but are much smaller in
comparison.

11. Roughly how many transistors might you find on a modern laptop?
In a modern laptop there is about 2 billion transistors in it.

12. What is the role of software?

The role of the software is to tell the computer what to do.
13. There was no such thing as software when Colossus was developed.
How did they get it to work?
So it goes like this, every time Colossus needed to do a different task
someone had to re-wire the computer.

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

I think it takes to 2-3 hours?

15. After rewiring Colossus it had to be given the secret message to decode.
What was used to provide it with the message?
Paper tape was used to provide it with message.
16. The item which held the secret messages contained lots of holes. What
was the purpose of those holes?
Paper tape holds binary data. Binary data has only two valves. In this case a
hole is Binary 1 and no hole is Binary 0. The holes are binary data which is
needed to solve the code. That is it purpose.

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:
Input Data
Process Data
Output Data
Most computers nowadays can also store data Colossus couldnt do this.