ColossusWorksheet
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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 very first electronic digital computer was created in 1944. 2. What was the name given to this computer? It was called The British Colossus 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? It was created in Bletchley Park. 1
description
This worksheet is about the first computer in the world.
Transcript of ColossusWorksheet
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 very first electronic digital computer was created in 1944.
2. What was the name given to this computer?It was called The British Colossus 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?It was created in 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 role was to break secret war codes.
7. Colossus used valves. What was the role of these valves?The role of valves was processing (cracking the codes)
8. How many valves were used on each of the 10 Colossus machines?1,500 on each of 10 Colossus machines.
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?They were small and did the same job as valves and the new computers became much smaller.
11. Roughly how many transistors might you find on a modern laptop?A modern laptop has 2 billion transistors.
12. What is the role of software?Software tells 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 re-wire the computer.
14. How long might it have taken to re-wire Colossus?It might have taken 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 was used.
16. The item which held the secret messages contained lots of holes. What was the purpose of those holes?Those holes showed the binary data. (Hole =1, no hole= 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.
